Thank you for your interest in my 3D Printed Pinhole Cameras and photography! Thank you also for trusting me with your private email address so that I may continue our wonderful conversation from last weekend. I will not be sending out any other mass emails after this one. However, PLEASE feel free to reply with questions, thoughts, or suggestions! I am delighted to share my projects, and welcome your emails. Please, also feel free to share this email with people who may be interested.

First things first: I may not have mentioned it, but everyone who gave me an email address (86!) was entered into a drawing for one of my latest cameras, the ACME. The ACME has fewer parts, NO FASTENERS, and is very easy to 3D Print. You can find more information here:

Without further ado, the ACME now belongs to: bgadekenXX@XXXXXXXXXX.XXX

(bgadekenXX, I will be emailing you separately to arrange delivery)

-------- Schlaboratory 3D Printed Pinhole Cameras

For review: I design, 3Dprint, and shoot pinhole cameras.

Before I was 3D printing pinhole cameras, I was building them out of wood and cardboard. I learned a lot about camera design and construction, but it was impossible to share my camera designs and improvements required time and carpentry. After I built my first 3D printer, I quickly tired of printing other peoples' stuff and wondered if I could 3D print a pinhole camera. The PINHE4D used 35mm film, was ghastly to look at, but made real photographs, and worked better than my wooden cameras ever did. 3D printing allowed me to quickly iterate the fit of parts and improvements to the design, and - more importantly - lets people all over the world download, print, and shoot my cameras.

They are licensedCreative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial. That means you can print them, modify them, share them, but you must attribute the original designer(s), and you can't sell them or use them for commercial purposes. I struggle with the non-commercial aspect, but I don't want to see poorly-made cameras on eBay with my name on them. If you have interest in using my cameras in a project, the license allows for exceptions.

Most of my camera designs have basic instructions for printing and assembly, as well as related comments and questions from users. I am always available for help and explanation.

NOTE: You must use an OPAQUE filament when 3D printing cameras!

-------- Pinhole Cameras

A pinhole camera is essentially a light-proof box with a tiny hole and a shutter. An image is projected into the box when the shutter is opened and if there is a photo-sensitive medium (film, paper, digital sensor) in the box, a photograph may be made.

A lensed camera focuses light by refracting it with a lens (or lenses). The pinhole is much smaller than the aperture of a lensed camera and the image is projected from that small aperture. The combination of aperture size and distance from the medium dictates the "speed" of a camera (how much light hits the medium) represented as an f/number. A lensed camera may have as small an f/number as f/22, but a pinhole camera may be much smaller, f/135, f/180, f/256. With less light hitting the film, the exposures are longer, possibly very much longer than with a lens.

The pinhole, itself, is actually not as critical as you might think. Good enough is definitely good enough. Because I tout my cameras as working tools, I am diligent in my process and precision. I make my own pinholes using this methodology:

Additionally, I check my pinholes for diameter and roundness with a digital microscope, but that is probably entirely unnecessary.

Attached to this email, find a mini zine titled Pinhole Photography Short & Sweet (PPS&S.PDF). You can print this out (100% size) and fold it into a tiny booklet. The zine explains the basics of exposure for pinhole photography. Making photographs with a pinhole camera is the essence of photography and will improve all of the photographs you make.

-------- 3D printing

A 3D printer can be thought of as a tiny glue gun, attached to 3-D Etch-A-Sketch, controlled by a computer, following a set of instructions like a player-piano. There are other kinds of 3D printers, but most consumer/educational machines are "Fused Deposition Modeling":

1. I first design the parts using simple Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools

2. Save the design in a file format that numerically describes their shape and volume in space (.STL)

3. The STL file is processed with a "Slicer", a bit of software that creates layered tool-pathing for the 3D printer from the original design. The Slicer is configured specifically for the printer and the filament being used.

4. The resulting instructions (GCODE) are fed into the 3D printer in real time by a controller connected to a computer or reading the GCODE from a memory card.

5. The 3D printer "draws" the first layer with molten plastic (remember, like a tiny glue gun), first the outline, and then filling in interior spaces. The plastic is precisely fed into the "extruder" (the tiny glue gun) as a thin filament from a spool. Large volumes of plastic needn't be solid, "infill" is a variable parameter.

6. After the first layer is drawn, the extruder is lifted a tiny bit, and the next layer is drawn on top of the first. And so on. The layer height can vary - I use 0.25mm for my prints, but most printers are capable of finer resolution, at the expense of print time.

Despite the details and complexity of my cameras, I use very simple, FREE design software:

I share every photograph I make with my cameras. Pinhole photography needn't be an unpredictable process with "happy accidents". If you understand your camera, film, and exposure, you will create the photographs you imagine in the scenes you see.

My photos are grouped by camera or subject and should be in reverse chronological order:

Join me on September 17-18 for the Seattle Mini Maker Faire! This family-friendly festival of invention and creativity offers tech enthusiasts, crafters, homesteaders, scientists, and garage tinkerers of all ages and backgrounds a public platform to show off their passion projects. Come see all the awesome creations!

photo credit: Evan Van Otten

@MakerFaireSEA is setting up shop @EMPMuseum 9/17 & 9/18!

Come see hundreds of amazing creations. #MakerFaireSEA

Aug 08, 16

Here, in the Schlaboratory, our scientists are slaving over simple CAD programs, with the goal of designing the best-shootin', easiest-to-assemble 3D printed pinhole cameras possible. With that in mind, the new terraPin ACME utilizes snap-together assembly, and bolt-free loading. In early trials, the slide-lock lid is light-tight and easy to use. At this time, the camera works best with the terraPin consumer winders (in nylon or metal), and off-the-shelf instrument knobs (1/4-inch shaft). Expect a revised winder-knob design suitable for FDM 3Dprinting soon.

This last photo is a composite of two exposures, inside and outside, at the back of the moving train. The outside exposure was quick - a second or two, while the inside exposure took several minutes. I used GIMP software to stitch the two resulting photographs together. No other post-processing or exposure adjustments were made. All photos made with Fujifilm Velvia 50 slide film. The optical vignetting is prominent in some of these shots due to the limited exposure latitude of this film. Black and white or color negative films may have less of this vignetting.

In a quest for an easy-to-print and -assemble pinhole camera design, I present the terraPin Prime. There are only four parts to the body, plus the winders (many options for this), using gaffer tape for some tasks. The only fasteners are the fixing bolt for the cap and the pivot for the shutter. Easy-Squeezy! (Make sure you are using absolutely opaque filament!)

Like all my camera designs, I have posted ALL THE PHOTOS I have made with the Prime.

I haven't been posting much lately because I have been working, among other things, on my photo book! The eBook version of RECTILINEAR Turista is hammered out and available for download. There was a defect in the form of a rotated photos, but that has been resolved. I used Bookwright by Blurb to create this, and it's a solid tool for making a nicely formatted book. When I discovered the problem with the photos, I contacted customer support. I am sorry to report that I could not get any help until I used Twitter to publicly call out Blurb for ignoring my incident. Seemed to work and somebody fixed the glitch in the matrix. The tech couldn't tell me exactly what happened, but assured me that it wasn't in the printed editions I ordered for preview. You can download the eBook HERE. Watch this space for more information about print editions of RECTILINEAR Turista

When I was a kid, the time between holidays and birthdays elapsed at a glacial pace – except for summer. Summer surged and heaved, a torrent, suddenly evaporating on Labor Day, leaving me stranded in a new classroom, confused and anxious, in my newest clothes. I have a whole catalog of sensations, mostly olfactory, that will instantly conjure my back-to-school apprehensions. Souring fallen leaves, linoleum, dew-dappled spiderwebs, a cool morning and the tang of an oil furnace… These memories are hard-wired into my brain and I fully expect them to surface in my doddering years. I may some day forget my caregiver’s name, but never the smell of a new spelling book.

As I’ve grown older, and have fewer years ahead of me, I have observed an unfortunate paradox regarding the experience of passing time. Those twenty-five weeks from Christmas to the fourth of July, that seemed a full eon in my youth, are gone in a flash. Indeed, even birthdays occur so rapidly that I’ve had to pause to calculate my age. Ten years have gone by and so fast... a lifetime for a fourth grader.

I’m not alone in this observation, and many people have mused on specific whys and how-comes. I used to wonder if our expanding Universe was shrinking the fabric of time like a clothes dryer, in some cruel cosmic equilibrium. Objective measurements of space-time, by genuine and lettered scientists, do not support my wild suppositions, however. The two most compelling explanations are “time ratios” and “novelty”.

The “time ratios” explanation, first couched by French psychologist Pierre Janet, dates back to 1877. Simply put, as you get older, a year is a smaller percentage of your age. The human brain apparently marks time on a relative scale. A single year for a ten year-old is equivalent to five years when he is fifty years old. I haven’t done the math, but a logarithmic calendar seems unworkable for planning even a cocktail party, when everyone lives at a different point on their time curve.

Amazingly, novelty – specifically unique life experiences – seems to slow the objective experience of passing time. Think back to that first day of school. Remember all the new faces, the new classroom, your new shoes, and the new expectations. The next day, it was still new. By the time you were comfortable with addition, what’s this? Multiplication? And so on. In an unfamiliar environment, everything is alien, and your brain is hyper-alert, actively engaged in making sense of your new surroundings. This necessary mindfulness packs your cerebellum with useful memories and connections to weigh and analyze every waking moment. No wonder Christmas takes so long to arrive.

As an adult, your life is probably fairly stable and routine. Everything has a predictable rhythm and weeks, months can go by without any noteworthy events. The wide, calm river of time carries you without a ripple, nothing breaks the glassy surface.

People who have been in traumatic car collisions can provide vivid accounts of the sound of the impact, what they saw in the moment, the smells of anti-freeze, gasoline. They describe junk from the floor adrift in the passenger compartment. An airbag blocks their vision and suddenly everything is quiet. An event that happened in a couple of seconds is magnified, unfolded in the brain and remembered in endless fractal detail.

I don’t want to crash my car to expand time. There are innumerable ways to add novelty to one’s life. Career changes, divorce, a new home, anybody’s basic list of stressful life events will do. Novelty needn’t be harrowing nor grim, it can arise naturally and easily through travel to a new or foreign destination.

A week spent in an unknown city will seem, in hindsight, a dilated temporal extravaganza. The food, language, public transit, are all nuts to be cracked, with wit, will, and wisdom. Waking hours packed with adventure and exploration harken back to kindergarten, when the world was bigger and brighter. It can be exhausting, but I promise your memories will be rich and plentiful. A week spent elsewhere will overshadow your routine daily existence, and for many years to come.

And this can be done at home, too. Seek out the new, the unknown. See your city, your hometown, like a tourist. Find the things that make visitors gasp. Take your normal weekly routine and pull it tight across a new landscape. It will stretch and the months of your year with it.

The river of time will ebb in its progress, not as a languid delta of featureless mud, but like a playful mountain stream. Your hours will tumble across the slope, bubbling and dancing over boulders, under and through log jams, eddying in tranquil leafy pools. No two rapids will be the same, there may be a waterfall occasionally, but you will catch your breath in the bracing spume for a moment before riding a rocky chute to another crystalline pool. And you will never forget.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I remember being forced to sit through my aunt Sally’s vacation slides. We’d be at her house for a holiday of some sort, having stuffed ourselves on roasted turkey or pot roast, with side dishes like gratin potatoes and green beans. I might be poking at the remnants of my third helping of yams. My sister and my cousin would be huddled in a corner, animating their dolls. The adults, stuporous, languished at the table, sipping canned coffee and painting their plates with the palette of desserts from the kitchen counter.

My aunt would slap her thighs and spring up. The table would suddenly be cleared, the dishes hastily stacked by the sink, and we’d all be ushered through the sliding door, into the paneled den. A folding screen would come out of a closet, the slide projector produced, like a magician’s rabbit, from a suitcase-sized box. A carousel of slides would be plucked from a stack of identical boxes.

I sat on the floor, in the dark, soaking in gorgeous Kodachrome, as my aunt extolled the pleasures of their latest (seventh?) visit to Disneyland. As an eleven year-old who had never been to Disneyland, I was carried aloft in a swirling hormonal storm of envy, longing, anger, curiosity, and awe. I wanted to get up and leave, but I didn’t want to might miss anything.

More than fifteen years elapsed before I was able to find my own way to Disneyland. Of course many things had changed, but much was the same. I vividly remembered my aunt’s photos of Main Street USA, and Small World, and Frontierland. I strolled around the park, waited in lines, rode the rides, and marveled at the animatronics. Everything was exactly what I expected but so much better. I was a pilgrim finally visiting holy ground.

I was riding the small gauge steam train that circles the park, reveling in the intoxicating incense of bunker oil and creosote, the rhythm of steel wheels on rails, when I understood why my aunt implored us to sit in her darkened family room and submit to her photography. I had always suspected that the trays of slides were a boastful artifice, collected and curated to elicit precisely the jealousy and humility I had felt. As that powerless eleven year-old, I had never expected that I might travel the 1200 miles to Disneyland. Yet, there I was.

I ached to freeze that perfect blissful instant, aboard that clacking little steam train, that I might later relive, savor, and share it. Kodachrome might have come close. All I have from that day are memories. They are excellent memories, but I wonder if a thousand words can match the pictures in my head.

I have said this since I was a kid. I believe that adventure can be found anywhere! Adventure is something you can cultivate during a visit to a neighborhood park or travelling to a distant, exotic destination. Adventure often finds you when you dare to break out and try something new and unknown.

Beehive and I were in Barcelona for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day last April, meeting up with more than 30 (pinhole) photographers from around the world. Having never been to Barcelona, we took every opportunity to strike out and explore new corners of the city. We typically took the subway to an distant destination, and then made the long walk back to our flat. On this particular day, we had taken the train to the Montserrat Monastery and on our return trip decided we were not quite ready to call it a day. We got off the train at Espanya Station and rather than catch a subway connection, we climbed from the depths of the city to find ourselves in a new landscape, Plaça d'Espanya.

Like spokes in a wheel, surface avenues and boulevards intersect at this point, while underground, subways and distant-service train lines converge. Arranged around the monuments and fountains in the center of the roundabout are all manner of interesting architecture. A former bullring loomed to the north, now a shopping mall. Beyond that, Miró's Dona i Ocell (Woman and bird) rose like a technicolor giantess from a park bearing the artist's name. Behind a chain link fence, we wished we could get closer.We walked a little further, and found a modern fire station at the edge of the park. It was late in the afternoon and no activity was to be seen Probably still siesta time. I really wanted a Barcelona fire department t-shirt, but I didn't want to disturb anybody.

Bombers de Barcelona (Barcelona Firefighters)

At this point, I am tired, hungry, and my feet ache. Beehive, inspired by Miró's Dona i Ocell and the relative proximity of the Miró museum, makes a case for walking up and through the Montjuïc to the museum. The Montjuïc, a low hill rising over the south end of Barcelona, has played a role in defining Barcelona culture for centuries. Several venues were built here for the 1992 Olympic games. Castles, fortifications, arenas, and museums are clustered on this mound.It's not a high hill, but the steps seem endless (there are actually escalators, but they weren't working) as you climb from the plain of Barcelona's streets and avenues. We paused to catch our breath and look out over the glorious city, and I shot this urn in the clouds.

An Urn With A View

My comfort and mood were both eroding as we continued to climb the hill, navigating toward the Miró museum using Google maps on my phone. By the time we arrived, I was sweaty, crabby, hungry, and tired. Of course, the museum closed in forty five minutes and I would have to check my camera bag. At least no one insisted on x-raying my film again. I kept one of my pinhole cameras in my hand, fully intending to exact a pinhole photographic revenge on the museum. Miró had an agenda of turning art on its ear and achieving an "assassination of painting", in the interest of promoting contemporaneous socio-political issues. In the context of his world, Miró was punk. He challenged accepted norms concerning art, design, and composition. He painted huge canvases with extremely subtle and fine linework in the interest of communicating his distress over Spanish politics. I sat for eight minutes, mulling his commitment, while my shutter was open.

Miró Tryptich: ""Painting on white background for the cell of a recluse"lines on essentially blank canvases.

Miró was connected to his contemporary surrealist/abstract artist friends and Alexander Calder has a couple of sculptures represented at the museum. The Mercury Fountain is an amazing monument to the mines at Almadén, Spain, which produced some 250,000 metric tons of mercury over nearly two millennia of operation.

The Mercury Fountain, Calder

As I wandered the halls of the museum, basking in the genius of Miró, I felt my hostility and agitation melt away. As often happens, closing time loomed and we began to hurry from one exhibit to another. An outside terrace beckoned, primary colors screaming for attention in the fading light. We stepped outside.

"Girl Escaping", Miró 1967

"The Carress of a Bird" Miró 1967 (handheld)

I balanced my pinhole camera on a handy surface to capture one sculpture, while choosing to hand-hold my camera for a different sculptural work. I worried that I might incur the wrath of the surly staff for using a camera in the museum. We tried to visit the gift shop, but were told that it was closed because the museum was closing in 15 minutes. I am positively certain that I could find whatever I wanted to purchase in 15 minutes, but it seemed to be a consistent theme for our visit to the Fundacio Joan Miró. I felt my mellowing mood skewing toward agitation again.Outside the museum, a characteristically red sculpture by Calder beckoned and I opened my shutter once again, this time on a proper tripod, seeking the contours and rivets that are common in his work. My mood eased and I felt at peace again.

I have my friend Hank to thank for the Body Snatcher idea of Zines, innocently planted in my brain during a recent breakfast. I've since been thinking a lot about a small run of a photo zine, featuring themed pinhole photos. This little pamphlet is the first of such things to be spawned by Hank's inspiration. I plan to include it with pinhole cameras that I send to people. It assumes some ignorance, and isn't really meant for experienced pinhole photographers. I like the idea of some small color photos printed on the reverse side. Stay tuned!

Two short years ago, I convinced my wife, Beehive, to join me in a grand social media experiment. The plan was to travel to Amsterdam, meet up with other pinhole photographers, and watch the awesome happen. On Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (WPPD).This amazing convergence was concocted largely by Alex, a self-deprecating git from Norfolk, with help from Inge, a charming photographer from Rotterdam. The idea began as an off-handed suggestion on Twitter, growing like a baby as people signed up on the Eventbrite page. This was happening before my eyes, unfolding in tweets, with perfect timing for my attendance.

I work in civil service and I pick my vacation for the coming year every December. As luck would have it, everything - the grand scheme, the wife's support, the necessary days off - aligned like celestial orbs, portending a good trip and new friends. It felt like unstoppable destiny.We met in Amsterdam, and, well, we had a blast. Everything was amazing - the city, the weather, the people, the food, the drink, everything! I remember it vividly, and I'd love to write more about it, but this is a love story that takes place elsewhere.

Amsterdamp, my official entry WPPD14, P6*6, f/167, Ilford FP4, 02:00

After our adventures in the Netherlands, we took the train under the channel and had some days in London, and then off to Reykjavik, Iceland. Beehive had been to London many times, but I had only been through the airport once. So, we stayed in the Portobello Road area, and hoofed it all over town, visiting museums, the Tower, and taking in an amazing performance of Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe, on the bank of the River Thames. I had brought some film with me to Europe that I had never shot as pinhole before: Ilford black and white, and some Fuji Velvia 50 slide film. The reciprocity failure corrections for different film stocks vary widely, and I rely on the collective intelligence of the Internet for that data, in lieu of testing myself. So, shooting a new film on Pinhole Day was a bit of a gamble. In England I leaned on my old friends Acros and Ektar. In Iceland, we rented a "three-door Jeep", a tiny Suzuki hardtop SUV, and drove a route called the "Golden Circle". We drove through the Þingvellir national park, the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur, which contains the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, and to the Gullfoss waterfall (meaning "golden falls"). I decided to try the Velvia 50.

Gullfoss, P6*6, f/167, Velvia 50 (RVP50), 00:03

I almost didn't make this photograph of the falls. We had hiked down to the falls in the bright May sun and gotten a bit damp from the spray. Back up in the parking lot, surrounded by the tour buses and milling Germans, the wind was chilling. The sun was bright, much brighter than I like for pinhole, meaning very fast exposures and potential for camera movement and unwanted blur. I loaded my pinhole camera with the RVP50, and screwed an ND filter onto the front. I was cold, the conditions were too bright, but I thought about how I very probably would never be here, in this amazing place, ever again. I left my wife in the Suzuki to warm up, and trudged up the path to an overlook. I set up my Gorillapod and metered the scene. Even with the exposure stopped down by the filter, the shutter would only be open for a few seconds. Putting a filter in front of your pinhole requires absolute cleanliness unless you want dust to be visible in your infinite depth of field. It also prevented me from using the finger-in-front-of-the-pinhole trick to avoid disturbing the camera during shutter movement. When I got back to the Suzuki, I had no idea if my exposure had worked. We drove off through a landscape that looked like Hawaii, eastern Washington state, and Alaska, sometimes all at once.

Back in Reykjavik, I continued to shoot the Velvia50, liking the slightly longer exposures in bright light.

We walked to the highest point in town, upon which stands the Hallgrímskirkja. A towering concrete church, it took 41 years to build and is designed to look like columnar basalt formations. An elevator takes you to the top of the church, for sweeping views of Reykjavik and the mountains beyond.

Across the street from the immense church, we enjoyed coffee and the open-face sandwiches that are ubiquitous in Skandinavia.Later, that evening, I hopped in the "three-door jeep" and drove frantically around town making pinhole photos in the hours-long Icelandic twilight. We were to fly out the next day and our time in Reykjavik was far too brief.

I visited the Sun Voyager, a harbor-side sculpture evoking a Viking longboat bent on explorations and discovery.

Reykjavik is home to a world-famous hot dog stand. Dating back to 1937, Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur has repeatedly been ranked the best place to get a hot dog in Europe and the world. The customers queuing for a wiener eyed me suspiciously as I twined my Gorillapod through a chain link fence and aimed my camera. In the fading light, I "acted natural" and pretended to talk on my phone during the lengthening exposure.

HARPA is a multi-purpose concert and cultural hall on the Reykjavik waterfront. A glowing glass and steel structure, it houses both the symphony and the opera.

Reflecting pools in front of the hall were mirror calm as the evening enfolded me.

I raced back to the top of the town, to make a photograph of the Hallgrímskirkja. I perched my pinhole camera on the base of Calder's statue of Leif Erickson, and opened the shutter for twenty-four minutes. The light was evaporating and I decided to double the original metered exposure as the sky darkened.

I returned to the apartment, disoriented and excited. I couldn't believe that it was almost midnight and I had been making pinhole photographs so late.

The next morning, on our way to the airport, we scheduled a detour to the Blue Lagoon, a hydrothermal spa, conveniently situated to extract one last payment from tourists who would sip ten-dollar beers in the silica-rich water. The landscape is otherworldly, and the pool is ringed by volcanic rock that would cut your feet to ribbons if you chose to escape overland. Those same rocks hide the geothermal plant that supplies the hot water to the spa, but beneath the low clouds it was truly surreal. Again, I reminded myself that this might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I set up my camera before catching the bus to the airport.

Everybody has one. My first blog was about my experiences in the Fire Service, which morphed into an autobiographical writing project. Later, I started another blog to share my tech projects, but lost interest in both. I am currently involved in the 52rolls photography project, which is a photo blog. I'm a little bit behind in my posts, but I have ample fodder in the thirty rolls of film I shot in Spain recently.Since my first blog, I have expanded my social media use, particularly Twitter, but recently also Instagram, sharing photography and science/tech projects and interests. There is a lot of cross-pollination in the Internets of schlem, with various and duplicated content, but this blog is about my photography, especially pinhole film photography. Despite a lifetime of photography and other artistic creativity, only recently have I really begun to self-identify as an "artist".So I humbly offer this, my latest bloggy project, with best intentions and a realistic understanding of my abilities, goals, and commitment. What are my goals for this blog? Glad you asked - My pinhole camera designs have been widely featured and discussed in various media, always with my photos supporting the capabilities of my cameras. I'm at a point where I want to discuss my photography as much, if not more, than the cameras I make. I also want to promote film photography, and provide technical data on exposure where possible. If I use a photo created with a digital camera, I will label it as such. Otherwise, expect the specific film used, at a minimum. Additionally, film photos will be uncropped and as scanned, unless otherwise noted.I have committed to the Flickr platform, and there I upload all my pinhole and other film. I don't, however, use Flickr to share much context or narrative on my photos. One thing I really appreciate about making pinhole photographs is the intimate engagement with the subject matter during the deliberate processes of composing and exposing. This forum can provide for some detailed story-telling in ways that Flickr, Instagram, and Twitter cannot.I plan to work on some print-related projects, including a photo zine. I print stickers and postcards, and this can serve as a portal to my other graphic design, as well as information on the terraPin pinhole cameras I make. Pinhole cameras, of course, can be expected, and I have an idea for an inexpensive light digital meter for pinhole or manual exposure use. I may even try a crowd-funding campaign after I get a working prototype. Stay tuned.I said this would be a photo blog, and here, for your perusal, are a couple of photos:

Velvia50, 2HT 3Dprinted stereo pinhole camera, f/167, 00:02

This is a pinhole stereo pair that I shot last November in New Orleans at the Saint Louis No. 1 Cemetery, the tomb of Voodoo Priestess, Marie Laveau. This is a "crossed" stereo pair, and you can best view the stereo effect by hacking your vision. Crossed stereo is easy to "free-view" in larger sizes, too. You can view this full-size HERE.These simultaneous exposures were made through two pinholes, 61mm apart. I made the 0.30mm pinholes by hand, and checked their shape and diameter with a digital microscope before mounting them in the "terraPin 2-Headed Turtle". I used Fujifilm Velvia 50 slide film and exposed it for 2 seconds in the bright (EV15) Louisiana sunlight. The shutters in the camera move in opposite directions to balance any induced movement when making an exposure. I am very satisfied with how evenly matched these two frames came out. Even the flaring from the sun on the edges of the pinholes is very similar in size and effect! In fact, I find all the stereo pairs I have made with this camera have come out well. I have several rolls of stereo pinhole from my trip to Spain that I plan to share soon.I will post updates to twitter, or you can subscribe to my blog. Thanks for your interest, and remember to always move to the right for lights and sirens!

I imagined more frequent updates to the Paramedichron, but time and motivation have both been lacking for the last couple of months. Which is too bad, because there has transpired much that warrants explanation and elaboration.

Thanksgiving came and went in a flash. We were spared the day from riding the rigs, which, in hindsight, was no great gift. Riding the rigs, and making Paramedical decisions, are the cornerstones from which this program has been, like an enormous house of plywood cards, structured. The academics are primarily a vehicle by which disorganization and chaos can be levelled upon us eighteen. The tests sneak up upon us, and cover material that are typically only hinted at through vague insinuation and long lists of diverse topics on the whiteboard. There is a small amount of winking and nodding on the specifics of certain test questions that might not have been fully explored in our classes, and, for the most part, everyone does OK on the tests.

The uniform for Paramedic Training is white, poly-blend "Smock" that is slightly similar to a lab coat or the longer mantles worn by residents and other doctors in training. Every so often, I am assigned to spend a shift - perhaps an entire long night - in the ER, and in the course of those fourteen hours, I am constantly, maybe desperately, called "Doctor" by patients who want to get the hell out of the ER, have their restraints loosened, or otherwise have answers to question that I cannot possibly provide.

The Smock is a source of certain pride, in that being at Harborview, to receive this world-renowned Paramedic Training, is an honor and privilege. The Smock opens doors, lends a credibility to well-intentioned efforts on our collective parts, and identifies us as participants in a medical tradition of ignorance, faith, and patience. This Smock of white, coupled with a cardkey badge that opens almost any door, ushers the motivated paramedic student into educational and medical opportunities that are the envy of other, lesser paramedic schools.

There are three previously-trained paramedics in our class - people with established careers in paramedicine - who recognized the quality of the education to be received at Seattle Medic One and Harborview, tested for the opportunity to go through this training (sometimes repeatedly), and are (re)learning beside the rest of us, sharing their wisdom when possible. These three intrepid men inspire me, and their commitment to being a better paramedic humbles me. Our bleached and pressed Smocks are our admission of submission to the (sometimes inscrutable) process that generates Copass paramedics.

The Smock, however, is also the shackle by which we eighteen are chained to our Faustian education. The Smock is exposed to pathogens, bodily fluids, odoriferous bacteria that thrive on the drench of fearful, cold perspiration, and must be regularly washed and ironed smooth. They are a robust garment, possessed of five capacious pockets, typically stuffed with the cheat sheets, IV catheters, gloves, masks, pens, nametags, and any other reference materials that will fit, all of which serve to allay the insecurity that accompanies the dispatch to the address of someone in need.

Every ten days or so, I get a couple of days off the rig, with no classroom obligation, and I make a beeline for the Rancho Ballardo, six or seven miles distant from the apartment (known as the Valle de Cula - ONE block from Harborview) where I spend most of my time. That the most-recent two days should coincide with Christmas is another example of the inexplicable luck that I have enjoyed my entire life. I was able to spend Christmas Eve with Lisa's family and Grandmother (it may very well be her last Christmas).

The Valle de Cula has an over-priced washer and dryer in the basement, but, so far, I have been able to lug my laundry home to Ballard every week or two. Remembering the copious amount of crap stuffed into the sundry pockets of the Smock, picture the ritual of removing the contents of those pockets and preparing for the next Smock-donning. I usually build a small pile from the items removed from the my Smockets, to be reassembled in and on a freshly-laundered Smock. Envision also the hurry and frenzy of gathering a load of laundry prior to the paramedic student equivalent of shore leave, and you might appreciate how an errant ballpoint pen might slip through the cracks. This oversight was only discovered after washing and DRYING a load of whites, including the twenty socks worn over the last week and half, and TWO smocks.

Fuck.

Paramedic Training provides three smocks for the acolyte, but I was lucky enough (again!) to inherit one more appropriately-sized Smock from an EFD brother who attended last year. That leaves me two Smocks if I can't eradicate the ballpoint ink from the polyester-blend fabric from which the cursed garments are constructed. At this point, I have soused the ink spots on the cleaner Smock with a 91% solution of rubbing alcohol (which is very handy at dissolving ink) and washed once. It came out cleaner, but with a few trouble spots. I doused it again, and it is back in the wash. Time will tell.

Let's add a small layer of complexity to this situation. Perhaps I am scheduled to be at the University of Washington Hospital Labor and Delivery tomorrow. Perhaps at 0600 hours. I have a spare Smock, but it is in the Valle de Cula, and I am hunkered down, resting my brain for the next 24-hour shift. Remember Johnny Mac, the driver? He's on duty tonight, but he has left the Valle de Cula unlocked so that Lisa might swing by and grab a clean smock for me. Does this sound like a complicated Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, with many moving parts? Time will tell, but I wager some measure of currency on my persistent good luck.

It all works out.

I have an unoccupied house for rent in Shoreline. Good luck will carry me. I know it. It all works out.

Your story hard to hear,We still can smell your fear.Don't know how to feel since they took away your smock!Your future's so unclear now,What's left of your career now?Can't even make a payment on your truck!

MAs and Nurses: (La lalala lalala lalala...)

P.M.T. Washout,No intubation count for you.P.M.T. Washout,Killed the manikin with your tube!Well at least you could have taken time, to disinfect your hands,After having your department spend more than a hundred grand!

Brother start packing (brother start packing)Why are you sitting on you ass?You took a whacking (you took a whacking)You know you're not the first half-fast!

If you drove on out to Central, you could spend your own money.Hand in your name tag and your iPad, E M T

Bleary eyed and a little nervous, we arrived early and milled around outside the Paramedic Training classroom. We were uniformly dolled up in our freshly-pressed blues and the trademark white labcoat officially known as a smock. Even though we had spent the last two months studying Anatomy and Physiology together, meeting nine Tuesdays in this very classroom, donning the schmock changes everything. This endeavor has suddenly become very real, and the next ten months are invisible in a fog of ignorance, like an unknown wilderness.

Our morning was filled with portentous introductions and tradition dimly recognized. We eighteen have tromped in polished duty boots into a hallowed institution, with a history and culture we may not fully understand. There are labyrinthine rules for situations unimagined and undesired. We were told, in no uncertain terms, to not fuck up so as to damage the Medic One organization, nor to have "relations" with the nursing staff, but I repeat myself. Our immunization records were examined and a TB titer test bubbled under our epidermis with a hair-thin needle by a cheerful Harborview nurse.

After a brief lunch, we were inducted into the realm of high-performance CPR and required to perform two minutes of flawless compressions. For some, this took a single effort, but there is always room for improvement and the profficient were told they could improve. Soon we were all dripping sweat inside our schmocks, and the stink of fear and damp synthetic fabrics funked the room. It didn't take too long to get everyone through their requisite flawless demonstration, and we were rewarded with (we were told) a rare attaboy.

The remainder of our inaugural day consisted of a primer on the iPad tablet, which forms a cornerstone to our curriculum. Some setup, some basic hands-on, and the clever little widget is ours to command. It has its limitations, and compared to my Linux netbook, it is a pretty toy, lacking in horsepower and memory. At twice the price. But in deference to Steve Jobs, (who passed away today), I tip my hat to the genius of the robust hardware, the simple interface, and the ruthless marketing that has made an over-priced hardware monopoly into a hipster fashion trend. In concession to the device, I am composing this Short Report on the cursed gadget with insignificant difficulty and complaint.

The apartment (a modest flat we call the Valle de Cula) is only a block away, and it is a luxury to have a bed, bath, and kitchen so close to where we will spend the better part of the next ten months. Two classmates share the space with the Driver and me: A young man from Port Ludlow, and another from Port Townsend. We walk together after class, each quietly processing the events and information from our confusing and overwhelming day.

A couple beers, a call to the wife, and it's about time to hit the rack. Friday night I will be on the medic unit (doing I don't know what) until 0730 Saturday morning and all day Sunday. I have nothing to read, and the more rest I can bank, the easier the long shifts will be.

I have worked for this for years, and it is amazing to finally be here.

I don't know what civilisation consists of, but I know it when I see it. - Sir Kenneth Clark

In the fifteenth century, in Florence, Italy, a prosperous family took to investing heavily in the arts. The House of Medici not only acquired masterpieces with their vast wealth, they also patronized artists whose names you now know as the Ninja Turtles: Raphael, Donatello, Michelangelo, Leonardo. Galileo Galilei was also on the payroll as a tutor to the Medici kids, until the Inquisition made it unfashionable to contradict Catholic orthodoxy. Even so, the Medici family loyally protected him for years after.

Among the beautiful architecture funded by the Medici family is the Uffizi, a palace originally meant to house the offices of Florence (Uffizi = Offices). It now enshrines the Uffizi Gallery, one of the oldest and most famous art museums of the Western World.

How I found myself in Florence is a tale of luck and warped priorities, best left for another time. Suffice it to say, that, after several amazing weeks, divided between Provence and Tuscany, in my last 36 hours, I could not marshal the energy to ride a train 175 miles roundtrip to see the marvels of Roma. I had arrived in Florence (concerned primarily with my departure from the local airport), checked into the Hotel Arno Bellariv, drained the mini-bar, perused a local attractions leaflet and was seized with the possibility of visiting some big-damn-deal museum in the last hours of a Saturday night. The next day I would fly away.

Imagine a warm and muggy August night, in the ancient and hallowed hometown of the Renaissance. Imagine also that the sky is pregnant with the promise of precipitation, and the flagstones are still damp in places from earlier showers. You best enter the Uffizi from the river side, via the arches beside the road fronting the Arno River, the Lugnarno Diaz. A long narrow courtyard, flanked by arched alcoves housing marble and bronze masterworks of sculpture, funnels you to the entrance. In the high season, the Uffizi is typically a several-hour wait for the unprepared and unconnected tourist. At five in the afternoon, so close to closing time, the line was a mere thirty minutes. I gawked, agape, at the public art of the courtyard, some ancient, others modern, a perfect appetizer for the indulgence ahead. A soul-stirring violin quavered from some shadowed and echoing hiding spot. Several times, I felt my breath catch in my throat in stifled sobs of ecstatic joy.

I paid a discounted fee for my late and necessarily abbreviated visit, and when I finally stepped through the doors, I had just barely more than an hour until the museum closed. I adopted a strategy of trotting between galleries and scanning the walls for any famous paintings or sculptures to which I had been exposed in my sheltered middle-class suburban upbringing. Either my education was better than I give it credit, or the Uffizi just has so many important works of art, but I found something I knew in practically every nook of that beautiful museum. Even the ceiling is papered with amazing renaissance artworks. I’d try to lay my eyes on everything in an area and then I would have to move on.

It was heart-breaking and exhilarating and frustrating and mind boggling. With so much history, and so many important artworks in that museum, I still feel like I disrespected the original Medici bequest and short-changed myself in the process – insult heaped upon injury. Ask me now what I saw and learned on that brief, magical evening in Firenze and all I can do is point to the familiar images in the souvenir guidebook I hastily grabbed in the gift shop. But I try not to forget.

And THAT is exactly what it’s like to take Anatomy and Physiology in eight weeks.

We're coming into the fifth week of the summer Anatomy and Physiology class, and the subject is the integration of somatic and autonomous neural activity in the nervous system.

I know.

In simple terms, what you want to do (or don't consciously know that your body wants to do) travels down the spinal cord from the brain or associated structure (descending neural fibers), and information from receptors travel up the spinal column, to the brain stem or your consciousness (ascending neural fibers). Sometimes, in the case of a stimulus interpreted as threatening to life or limb (such as grabbing the hot handle of a pot of bubbling spaghetti sauce), before you are even aware that you did something superlatively silly, an interneuron in your spinal cord fires a quick signal to a muscle to contract and, hopefully, pulls your hand to safety. Then your conscious awareness gets the signal, and you spout some profanity and/or obscenity, while you run your arm under cold water.

It's truly amazing, but if you've ever done it, odds are split that you might inadvertently slop some boiling tomato concoction on your tender forearm. Which isn't all bad, in that other mechanisms in your central nervous system etch that experience in the neurochemistry of your brain, and maybe next time you'll use a hotpad.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.- Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of The Future", 1961 (Clarke's third law)

I feel like I am attending Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the boarding school attended by Harry Potter and his friends. Or, more accurately, I am satisfying the prerequisites necessary just to pass through the huge carved wooden doors. Either way, the concepts and mechanisms revealed in this abbreviated summer course of Anatomy and Physiology are fantastical and amazing.

Every week, we have a reading assignment and a quiz. The readings started with a linear march through sequential chapters, but by week three, we are hopping around the thick book, at the fiat of our instructors. The book is heavily cross-referenced, which serves to make the daunting information slightly less unintelligible. Getting this information to stick in the network of synapses and neurons between my ears demands a full scale assault on the facts and concepts, with hand drawn diagrams, copious highlighting, and repeated visits to an equally fact-dense website.

We eighteen "anointed" (in the wry words of the venerable Dr. C.) come from a variety of Washington state agencies, with a few lucky extra-state candidates who tested into the South King County Medic One program. Most us are also on duty in our departments while taking this "online" course. In round numbers, in addition to the standard forty-hour work schedule, our studies require another forty. This has caused no small amount of strife between unions, administrations, and Dumbledore. There is a weekly study session, described by the Paramedic program as optional, consisting of test review and lecture. That no one voluntarily misses this opportunity for face-to-face contact and clarification from the instructors speaks to the notion of option.

The Driver, in addition to studying and working, spent the first two weeks in the throes of moving. He rented out his house for the next year or more, to live in the apartment provided by our Department. I plan to bivouac in the flat as necessary, making strategic raids on the house in Ballard for domestic and marital reinforcement. Two other paramedic students will co-habitate with us.

The assignment for week three included obtuse chapters on muscular physiology and the endocrine system. After investing two days in sarcomeres, I found the endocrine material particularly baffling. I was not alone. During this difficult academic week, the Driver informed me that he had been squandering his days off solving a septic drain field problem at his rental. In typical fashion, he shrugged it off with a resigned and ambivalent, "Whatever."

I characterize the endocrine system as similar to the nervous system, but with carrier pigeons, spam email, propaganda, and pixie dust. Run by Kim Jong Il and host of crazy minions. Of course, I attended the classroom session, but I needed to revisit the taped lecture more than once, annotating my notes in different colors each time. I took the test Friday, confident that I had most of the arcana and minutia under, at least temporary, control. Twenty-three questions, and almost nothing on the bulk of my concentrated efforts.

We are entering a cave, perhaps a long and winding tunnel. We eighteen are only a few steps into the cavern, and the air is warm, the floor and walls dry. Ahead, in the murk, I hear dripping water, sloshing sounds, and the occasional scream echoing off the rough stone. For the next year, it is going to consume our every waking hour, just to get to the end of the tunnel. Behind me, I can hear birdsong. The heady fragrances of blossoms and mown grass still swirl in the air, and the bright summer sunlight filters into the gloom. The backwards pull of security and ease is still palpable.

I have worked towards this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for years. I expect to see, learn, and do amazing things. I have heard tales of suffering and humiliation. I am excited, but I worry about the unknown. I have seventeen comrades in this adventure, and A & P is only the first challenge.

In the NASA space program, astronauts are selected from the ranks of extremely capable, intelligent, and disciplined professionals. In the early days of space pioneering, the hiring pool was primarily military, primarily pilots, primarily the best of the best. John Glenn, for instance, a decorated Marine pilot, was the first American to orbit the Earth, and returned to space at age 77 on the space shuttle, Discovery. In between his bookend space voyages, he managed to fill his time as an Ohio senator from 1974 - 1999. Neil Armstrong, the first human to walk on the Moon, was a test pilot, who flew the X-15 rocket plane to the very edge of the atmosphere, at an amazing Mach 5.74 (3,989 MPH). The X-15 proved to be a farm league for aspiring spacefarers. These men were undeniably the best of the best. Of. The. Best.

Today, in an age of almost-routine space flights, and after thirty years of shuttle missions, the pedigree of astronauts has blossomed to include geologists, climatologists, meteorologists (pick your favorite Ologist), teachers, researchers, and, as mentioned, a retired astronaut-senator. The shift from get-it-done, proof-of-concept space flight to nuts-and-bolts space science demanded a wide variety of educational credentials, in addition to the ability to function in a dangerous environment, under stressful conditions, and the ability to improvise and make critical decisions. Make no mistake - contemporary astronauts are still highly-trained primates in a rocket, but now they need to do more than just push the right button, at the right time, and not freak out. They have extra-primate gifts, talents, and training that benefit the goals of NASA, and, ultimately, all of the other primates down here on this globe, plus the other animals and plants that share this cosmic oasis.

While there is considerable status in being an astronaut, everyone understands that the mission is the priority. Decisions about safety, weather, or equipment trump the personal aspirations of individuals in the program, and it's expected that if something goes awry, the launch may be delayed or scrubbed. For someone who has devoted a considerable amount of their life to the barest chance of space travel, I can only imagine that such an occurrence is a crushing disappointment. But the mission dwarfs the tiny (yet highly-qualified) monkeys that strap themselves into the seats of an immense and exquisitely exotic vehicle that roars skyward on a plume of fire, only to glide home when the work is done.

The Driver and I have heard that there is a storm coming. There is no doubt that it will pass very close to the our launch pad, but we continue preparing ourselves, hoping that our launch will not be aborted. We chat about the consequences of a delay in our launch window, hopeful that this is wasted conversation. The storm will certainly impact our command base, but it is unknown whether the mission will continue, or if it will necessarily be affected. We do not know.

If your talk to a dietitian for any length of time about the American Diet, eventually the subject of nutrient density will come up. The idea is that certain foods are nutrient-poor and that certain other foods are packed with vitamins and minerals. Your goal, as a health-conscious American human, should be to maximize the nutrition of the foods you eat. Sounds obvious.

Unfortunately, many of the toothsome items that we expect to be part of our day-to-day diet are packed with nothing but calories. Evidently, you can apply the "yummy test" to any foodstuff, and if you really, really like it, it should probably be hidden on the top shelf, out of reach, out of view, or - better yet - left on the shelf at the grocery store.

Take, for instance, a cookie... A delightful little nugget, consisting of sugar, simple carbohydrates, and fat, it offers little in the way of nutrition - even if packed with oatmeal, raisins, and nuts. It's a calorie bomb, specifically designed to tickle discreet receptors in our mouth and brain that respond to easy energy, a remnant of our hunter-gatherer origins.

Once upon a time, buying groceries was extremely hard work. Someone, probably the womenfolk, would have to traipse across the savanna, poking at the landscape, scratching in the soil, rattling the bushes, to fill the larder. The menfolk, meanwhile, took part in ritual hunts that occasionally resulted in meat over a fire, but provided ample grist for tales of the One-That-Got-Away.

Survival was hard, but evolution was kind, in time, to the early peoples who developed a taste for the sparse sugar or fat-laden "cookies" of the day. Perhaps fruits, avocados, or rich fatty meats constituted the fortuitous treats to be had. Regardless, our bodies evolved a mechanism that rewards calorie-dense consumption with a tiny chemical neurologic prize. Eat something sweet or rich, and you feel inexplicably good, even happy

I bring all this dubious anthropology up because I am suddenly immersed in studying Anatomy and Physiology. The foundation of pending weeks of scholarship will be my understanding of basic biochemistry and microbiology. I studied geology and chemistry in college, but I only have a sixth-grade biology education, which I dredge up from decades-old synaptic memories. I am amazed that I remember anything, and, more amazing, is that what I remember is still relevant.

The text I am reading, highlighting, and transcribing as notes, is nutrient-dense. The information packed in its pages is the culmination of hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, and absolutely up-to-date. It is broccoli printed, bound, and delivered to my hands, and ultimately my brain. There is so much information on any given page that I frequently read it several times, before selecting the key facts that I will endeavor to commit to memory. I duplicate important diagrams and images, in the hope that recreating it will burn it into the fabric of my cerebellum.

I am chewing, chewing, chewing, digesting the information with my note-taking hand, but the information is so mind-boggling, so arresting in its awesomeness, that I can't help but feel a tiny little tickle in my cortex, an electrochemical reward for understanding even a thin slice of our biological mechanics. If I were a religious person, I would classify the feeling I get as reverent. As it is, the more I understand about the minutia of cellular biochemistry, the more dumbfounded I am.

The Anatomy and Physiology course starts on July 26th. We have text books in hand, if not an actual syllabus. We have met with the Honorable Doc, and he has drawn his private conclusions from the meeting - filed away, no doubt, only to be produced during our Most Heinous Moments Ever. We know (approximately) Where to be, When to be there, and little more. At least for Day One.

During the course of the pre-amble to this adventure, The Driver and I have been told many things, most of which have evaporated in a swirling cloud of vapor when exposed to department chiefs, critical examination, or the light of day. As we approach the zero-hour of immersion in the first chapter of this endeavor, the tales that we have heard have crystallized into wishful thinking, best intentions, and tooth fairies. These misunderstandings fall at our feet, singing like tiny shards of broken pane.

The Driver and I discuss such matters; we share a jaundiced disappointment in the Bureaucracy, and a small disgust at the petty skirmishes that stand between us and our year of scholarship. We look at each other, exchange silent nods, and turn our tired bodies back-to-back.

Our swords may be corroded, long un-used, dragging in their sheathes, but we simultaneously draw them forth. Even so, they flash wickedly in the glare of this mid-July afternoon, his low, mine high. At some unspoken cue, they align, extended and opposite to one another. A biting reckoning awaits.

I must have been in, perhaps, sixth grade, and I was bringing a monstrous creation to life in the woods behind the Harvest Gold split-level on Willow Road. I had ached for a tree house my entire short life, only to move into a suburban, verdant neighborhood, with my own private Sherwood Forest. A perfect triad of hemlock trees waited in the back yard, beyond sight of the house, hidden by spirea and thimble-berries. Being an indifferent, under-achieving sixth grader, I had ample time for this project. The only obstacle to beginning construction was matériel.

Like a shed-roofed addition for growing family's house, Halley Plat was squeezed into a parcel of woods between the moneyed vistas of Edgemoor and Chuckanut Drive (well before it worms south and becomes the Most Scenic Highway in the world). Like the aforementioned domestic expansion, the craftsmanship of the modest homes being built there was slightly frantic. Contractors steadily swarmed over foundations, erected studs, sheathed it all inside and out, and - Lo – a house popped into being, mushroom-like.

I made twilight visits to homes-in-progress, tromping across damp plywood floors, scaling the treadless stair risers, taking in details of framing, nostrils awash in the tang of sawdust, the musk of curing concrete. Pallets of plywood and two by fours slumbered under the dark sky, tools lie where they landed at five o'clock. Building my tree house could have been trivially easy. A trusty accomplice, some midnight skulking, and all the wood that we could chuck into the trees could be ours.

Fortunately, as regards my character, my compass pointed north to scrounging, not the southern bearing of theft. Unfortunately, as regards the quality of my tree house, I found it necessary to patch together scraps and odd remnants in my arboreal endeavor. The timbers running between the trees I sourced easily enough, but the plywood decking bridging these joists came from discard bins at construction sites. Luckily, I happened upon a piece large enough to cover half the triangular floor. The balance of the empty space I bridged with a tilting stair-step arrangement of smaller and smaller bits of exterior plywood, riveted together with the abundant sixteen-penny nails that littered the mud surrounding the concrete footing for the new houses. I had become a necessary combination of Doctor Frankenstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Artful Dodger.

I relate all this prepubescent acquisition, lurking, and attendant hammering because the production of a tree fort necessitates the employment of a certain simple machine. Swinging a hammer at found fasteners, into salvaged lumber was all well and fine, but the mechanics of climbing ten feet with hands full of supplies and tools required a pulley. The origin of this pulley is lost in the mists of my recollection, but I can state with confidence that when it fell into my possession, I immediately knew it would serve one day as the supply line between Terra Firma and my future, fantastic lofty fort.

If you give any thought to the problem of hoisting something, anything, aloft, in the process of building in the trees, you'll see the fallacy of using a pulley. A rope, by itself, is sufficient for the task: secure your load, clamber up, hoist as you may. A pulley, however, allows you to stand on the ground below, and, courtesy of the noble wheel and axle, converts your downward pull on the rope into an upward vector for the work you exert upon the mass of the burden you are lifting. A completely superfluous, yet delicious, exercise in mechanics.

This tableau of Oregon Grape and Salal is where I may have received my radioactive spider bite. I'm not entirely certain from where my peculiar power came, but I recall a certain event, in a surging ocean of well-recalled, crystal-clear life experiences, that may be the genesis of my particular gift. I still bear grudges against kindergarten classmates, and I assure you that my memory is excellent. Based on what I know about cognition and the nature of intelligence, I can conjure only one possible etiology and I remember the events vividly, like a landscape frozen in the strobe of a lightning bolt.

I was fixing to nail an irregularly-shaped fragment of half-inch ply onto the previously-secured random chunks of laminated wood that constituted the crazy planes of my burgeoning elevated garrison. I had tossed the lumber up and onto the existing surface, but decided to utilize the pulley to freight the hammer upwards, an antique owned by my late grandfather, Amos – a blacksmith. I have since learnt the value of a handful of useful knots, but at the time, my ignorance called for improvisation. The turns of frayed cordage, like a lashing of writhing snake, tightened and clutched at the hickory shaft, the coils slipping like the stranglehold of a python on the proverbial greased pig.

I replay this tiny drama in my head, and I'm amazed that I possessed not the sense to stand beyond the probable trajectory of a one-pound chunk of steel set to fly by gravity and a shitty knot. When the rope was fully hauled, I bent to belay the line to a makeshift cleat comprised of a pair of nails driven into the bark of one of the hemlocks. The twining and looping of the rope around the nails must have tickled the snake's hold on the hammer's handle and potential energy proved kinetic.

I remember a wave of nausea hitting me like a crashing breaker, slapping me down against the hard sand of a littoral abruptness. I may have blacked out for a time; I was alone and don't know for sure. I clutched at my senses, reeling between the roots of the second-growth adolescent trees, who were audibly laughing at me in their quiet manner. I fought down the rising gorge in my throat and abandoned any thoughts of swinging a hammer, much less climbing trees, that afternoon. The hammer had fallen a minimum of seven feet only to land squarely on my crown. I never told anyone about the undeniable concussion I had suffered that day. My interest in the tree fort, my ugly platform in the woods, waned rapidly after I summoned the fortitude to finish the final bit of half-assed carpentry that defined the realization of my secret desires.

Long before I picked up a hammer (millions of years actually), lemur-like ur-primates, our forebears, were engaged in an evolutionary arms race in the wake of a some very bad luck at the end of the Cretaceous Period. Actually, the situation might be better described as a biological game of RISK. Eighty-five per cent of Earth's species were snuffed out, like so many birthday candles, after a well-understood cometary or asteroidal impact (the account of paleosleuthing by Luis and Walter Alvarez reads like fine detective mystery) in the Yucatan region of what we modern humans have decided to call Mexico. The species that survived this archetypal nuclear winter woke up to a world in which only fifteen per cent of the available environmental niches were occupied. If you allow that there may have been a selection for species with similar habitat needs (mouse-like burrowers, for instance), the Tertiary sun may have risen over an even emptier planet. But I digress.

So profound is the devastation in the strata laid down on day one of the Paleocene, that the absence of late Cretaceous fossils (dinosaurs, ammonites - the list is long) define the boundary. In college, I had the dubiously envious job of Paleontology Research Assistant, and I have seen the sediments from the Brazos River section in Texas with my own eyes. Indeed, it was my job to pick through carefully-collected zip-lock bags of mud, looking for macro fossils, and seining the remaining grit for the minuscule survivors called Foriminifera, amoeba-ish creatures with elaborate and distinctive tiny shells. The post-grad financial certainty of performing similar paleontological analyses for oil companies discouraged me so that I abandoned paleontology as a major, and floundered in both direction and scholarship for the next couple years.

Such a suddenly-empty planet is great laboratory for the biological forces that blossom as diversity through the processes of evolution. Some browsing creatures opted for immensity, as plains of newly-invented grass went to seed and needed mowing. Others, like the ground sloth, existed largely on the fruit of revolutionary flowering trees we have labeled “Avocado”or “Ficus”. Terrible predators, all scimitar teeth and raking claws, pounced on the meaty herbivores when their backs were turned. Elephants (well, their great x 102grandparents) experimented with various dental configurations and an elongated, useful proboscis. Our ancestors, however, in a desperate board meeting, decided that the problems of their continuing propagation hinged not so much on hardware, as software.

The notes of that conference, if the secretary had yet been invented, are lost in the annals of hominid history, but the marketing strategy and production schedule have manifested in the latest version of Homo, as testified to by the extent to which we have colonized our hostile planet, and embarked on polluting it with our garbage and exhalations. The secret sauce in this global domination scheme was not a better set of armament or sheer bulk (but props to venomous insects and whales), or any other specialization. What makes Humans the dominate species on Earth (as measured by effect, not biomass) is that we generalize. And we do this with a tremendously flexible information-processing organ behind our binocular eyes, between our stereo ears. “I'm cold”, “I bet that Mastodont is tasty”, “I want to fly to the Moon” - these are problems that the brain can solve where sharp claws or a penchant for Bamboo would definitely, ultimately fail.

The brain is so astoundingly complex that it boggles the mind. Grok that – As smart as we are, we are only beginning to understand the basics of how we understand.Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a way to isolate and render images of the cogs in the brain:

“In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies. ... In fact, one synapse may contain on the order of 1,000 molecular-scale switches. A single human brain has more switches than all the computers and routers and Internet connections on Earth.”

The most complicated information-processing structure on Planet Earth is the result of cosmic chance and the combined efforts of millions of monkeys. And there are almost seven billion of them in production. To be sure, it is easily the absolutely best problem-solving technology available, and it can be assembled by unskilled labor.

As you recall, objects accelerate in Earth's gravitational field at approximately 9.8 m/s/s. To clarify, for each second spent falling, an object's velocity increases by roughly 10 meters per second (disregarding Earthly effects like the friction of air on the object). In round numbers, at one second, the object, starting from rest, is plummeting groundward at ten m/s, another second later, and it's falling at twenty m/s. Three seconds: thirty m/s. The speed is increasing, even though the rate of speed change (acceleration) is constant.

Suppose that we suspend an object (say, a sixteen-ounce [0.5 Kg] hammer) about seven feet (2.13 m) above another object (say, a human cranium containing a 3-pound [1.5 Kg] brain). Suppose also that the hammer object is secured by an inept lashing of parachute cord, such that it releases its tenuous hold on the handle of the hammer just as it reaches an altitude of a previously-mentioned 2.13 meters above the previously-mentioned brain. The word “Oh...” is all that is muttered before the hammer impacts the frontal bone, superior to the upwards-tilted forehead of the muttering fool, who gapes upward, at the falling hammer.

In the interval of time between the hammer slithering from the clutches of ill-tied cordage and cranial impact, the brain of the target subject had to recognize that the hammer was both falling, and falling in a predictable path that intersected the subject's head. That the eyes could, in this brief moment, transmit this information to the brain, that the brain could pluck an appropriate response from its banks of synapses, that the mouth and tongue could begin to form a verbal oath, is testament to the flexibility and power of the human brain. Arms were, undoubtedly, moving to fend the missile, but inertia and a complicated neural connection prevented the intended blockade. An observer would marvel at the situation, probably doubling over with laughter, as the truncated, but implied “...SHIT!” was appended by the synapses of his own brain.

I leave the specific mathematics as an exercise for the motivated reader, but suffice it to say that more altitude (thus more acceleration) might have rendered the author a drooling idiot, provided he even survived the impact. A lesser impact would have hurt, well, less. The miracle is that the hammer fell precisely as hammers do, precisely as fast as necessary to have exacted the mechanical alteration of brain tissue that I'm convinced happened on that afternoon.

As we know, the brain is fabulously intricate, like a mantel clock fabricated from cement trucks, driven by penguins, in a landscape of fried rice, awash in a sticky fruit cocktail. Or not. I don't believe that the electrochemistry of my injured brain was altered, which would demand a fundamental alteration to neurological functioning – and where would these new chemical compounds come from, anyway? A new organ might need to spring into existence, secreting the Pixie Dust that powers the cognitive energy of my altered gray matter. Even an alteration to an existing structure is so unlikely as to be statistically impossible, like an aerial giraffe. But if this supposed, newly created apparatus did exist, it would need a snappy name. Perhaps the Canal of Schlem - but alas, that's taken.

I think that, perhaps, the hammer bruised an area of my forebrain, a humble region responsible for cross-checking imagery and verbiage against some synaptic check sheet of understood comparisons. For a healthy brain to function, it must necessarily catalog every experience and idea into the context of previously-sorted information. A myriad of neural connections are made, and, after a long life of meaningful and orderly thought, if your mind should unravel slightly in your autumn years, surprising expressive and perceptual glitches might manifest. It's possible that the disruption in my cerebral cortex reworked certain critical housekeeping routines, such as help govern the protocols of human communication.

Wielding even a minor super power is an awesome responsibility. I must flex my mental muscles carefully, lest I unintentionally launch someone through the plaster and lathe of the cognitive reality in which they reside. The nature of my ability is such that I cannot simply discard a frayed overcoat of normalcy and assume the über-persona, turning back time, for instance, by dragging the Earth backwards, in a cape and tights. It's much more subtle than that.

I must live in a portable Fortress of Solitude, where I filter my inner thoughts through a complicated colander of social algorithms that prevent my friends and associates from reacting to me as if I were a rabid badger. True, it's partly for their protection, but my own safety calls for discretion. My associative gift might easily be misconstrued as a flavor of mental illness or a “cry for help”. At times, it's a lonely existence, a social wilderness, but the occasional metaphorical connection is worth it. I heft my similes and gauge their power like dangerous automatic weapons.

I bring adventure like a brakeless lorry descending a serpentine mountainous highway paved in cinders and broken glass. I am the Blue Screen of Death. I live in the shadows of polite conversation and well-intentioned homily. I swing my mace of reckoning through slap-dash windmills of superficiality.

This is the ancient recipe, as told to me by my secretive and somewhat accident-prone elder, Shirlee. NOTE: There are no cake mixes of any kind in this pastry. Use fresh, high quality almond extract. Butter or nothing! This is a distillation of process, Shirlee may not have done things exactly in this manner, but do not question the method nor madness. This is how I do it. Follow these simple steps and all your dreams will come true, you will feel better about yourself, people will love you, your hair will look better, your house will be clean.

One must attain the proper mindset prior to attempting this delicacy. Prepare thyself by washing and you must have a meal. Touch no animals. Remove your shoes. Set out the butter to warm. Play some music you love; pour yourself a drink. Begin:

Shirlee's Secret Almond Magic

All goodness comes in threes:

Bottom Layer

1 stick butter (4 oz)

1 tbs water

1 cup flour

Middle Layer

1 stick butter (4 oz)

1 cup water

1 tsp almond extract

3 large hen fruit (not XL)

Frosting

1 box powdered sugar

1 stick butter (4 oz)

milk or cream as needed

1 tsp almond extract

Slivered Almonds

Preheat oven device to 350 F (177 Celsius; 450 Kelvin)

Mix components of bottom layer. Divide into two spheres. Pour yourself a drink. Name the spheres (one masculine, the other feminine). Imagine how the perfection of these spirits (not your drink) might be manifested. Pick up the feminine sphere (ladies first), holding her image in your mind. Mash her round ass into a flat pancake 12 inches by 3 inches. Get a cookie sheet and lay her corpse down one side. Smirk. Grab Biff, and with his dashing wit and perfect teeth foremost in your thoughts, pummel him into the same two-dimensional shape as Buffy. Lay him out cold next to the chick. Gloat.

Pour yourself a drink.

When your adrenaline subsides, begin making the middle layer by bringing the water to a boil. This water shall represent really hot water. Pop quiz: Who, at work, makes you the craziest? He or she shall then take the form of the stick of butter. Undress your coworker, noticing how, as the trappings of status and authority are stripped away, nothing remains but pure fat. Pity this unfortunate soul and apologize as you push the body under the boiling water with something blunt. Listen carefully... when it's over add the almond extract and flour to cover your crime. Beat until smooth. Beat a little more just to be sure. Set aside. Pour yourself a drink. Assemble the eggs. Flatter them. Promise them fame and glory. Keep a straight face. Tell them you have an important job for them. Name them if you must, but if you are perceptive they will name themselves. Position two eggs such that they cannot observe. Break the lone egg in a deep and cold bowl. Laugh maniacally. Repeat with next egg. Laugh some more. Show third egg the fate of the other two and politely request some changes in attitude and behavior. Disregard protests and groveling and break egg into bowl with comrades. Remove the evidence of the shells to pre-arranged hiding spot. Beat those eggs with intensity. Add the eggs to the flour mixture. Reflect on the cold irony of life as you mix it all up until smooth. Remind yourself that these were not good eggs.

Pour yourself a drink.

Remember the two corpi delilcti on the cookie sheet? They have metamorphosed into your flaws and mistakes. The egg and flour goo is treacherous backstabbing; with it, hide your flaws and mistakes. Lay it on thick. Cover every last little bit. Make someone work hard to see through it. If they do, eliminate them. Slide your camouflaged defects into the oven. Set a timer for 35 minutes. Enough time for a drink. Or two. When timer goes off, check pastry. If necessary, continue to bake 5 minutes more until golden brown and puffy. Remove from oven and set aside. It may flatten somewhat as it cools.

Take a nap.

Later, look carefully at the pastries on the cookie sheet. No, look closer. Take your time, your eyes may not focus well at this point. That's the best you can do? Pathetic. I thought you were paying attention. I thought you were going to try harder this time. Why do I even waste my time? You don't want anybody to see this; you better put something over it. If you mix up another cube of butter and maybe the powdered sugar, that might hide the bland ugliness you have baked. Put in the almond extract to help mask your ineptitude. For God's sake, put down the food coloring - are you mad? Do you want to go to jail? Good, now spread it on the pastries - do be careful and try to make it look appetizing. A flourish with the spatula might come in handy here. No, use it all. Not enough frosting and people will retch. Still looks horrible. Sprinkle on the almond slivers. Don't eat that, you need all you can get. Geez Louise... Now they look like flat white turds with nuts on them. Do you have a knife? Weeeell, you could kill yourself with it or cut the pastries into strips, bars, whatever. A platter, a plate? Arrange them somehow. Like a flower! Or a pyramid! Something besides flat white turds. That's gonna have to do. Uh, plastic wrap... don't want them to dry out - Duh!

Not bad for a first effort. Don't you feel better? You better have a drink.

My wife is busy, busy, busy. She's in school and studies almost every waking hour - when she's not in class. It's finals week and all weekend she has ladled obstetrics and natal development into her over-full mind like a desperate, sour stew.

This morning, she left for class, only to return to the house immediately. I assumed she forgot something.

"I need to take your car - there's something wrong with mine." Her car is not old, but I have a deep-seated mistrust of Subarus, and I take this as confirmation of my prejudice. "The steering is stiff," she says. "I'm gonna be late!" Why do these things always happen when you're pressed for time?

She shuttles her books to my truck and, barefoot, I retrieve some tools and boat parts from the back seat. As she roars away, I struggle to wedge myself into the front seat of her car, reminded of one of the reasons I will never own another Subaru.

I take it for a quick spin around the block, and she's right - the steering is far too stiff. Normally, the Outback is nimble, but I have to crank the wheel like a bus driver to make a ninety degree turn on the street. Even then, I swing into the opposite lane a little bit. I have a grumpy right shoulder and I feel the same discomfort that visits me after too many push ups.

Somehow I park it back in the driveway and pop the hood. A wide, grooved belt lies in loose coils behind the radiator. Crap. The belt looks brand new, so I doubt that it merely snapped. Perhaps a pulley has broken, or maybe the alternator is loose. If it's just a belt, I could fetch the part on my bike.

A quick search on the Internet reveals little. The few hits I get from "Subaru Fan Belt" lead to members-only forums or Slavic web sites. I'll have to dig into it, trusting my mechanic's intuition.

Back under the hood, there's a piece of trim on top of the engine hiding the upper portion of the belt's serpentine course. The intake manifold arcs through a pair of holes in this trim plate, like the backs of a pod of silver whales. A duct of some sort crosses over the right corner of the engine compartment, affixed to the radiator support by two bolts. It's all in the way, and I'll have to remove it.

I fetch a metric socket set and remove the bolts from the obstructing plastic parts. I lay them in the grass, arranging the fasteners on top. I turn my attention to the belt. A cocktail of relief and revulsion floods my veins. I can fix this, but... gross.

As I type this, my fingertips feel a little strange. Perhaps it's the paint crusted in my whorls, or the "defatting" of my skin from solvent used to spot at dabs and drips on my hands. Certainly, if I were inclined to use lotion, it would be recommended.

To be honest, I have been using an epoxy primer that requires a thinner so foul that you can hear the brain cells dying - with an audible snap - in your head with every breath. I took the work outside, and I noticed two things: my olfactory receptors quickly became saturated and immune to the sharp sting of vapor, and I became ravenously hungry. I've used this particular product before, years ago, when I restored a San Francisco Pelican sailboat. A weatherly little sloop, it was built like a proper tub and carried a junk-like lug sail. I had the bottom repaired with copious epoxy and this particular primer was the only product appropriate as a go-between for the resin and the paint I chose. Every time I smell that solvent, I am transported to an inverted hull under a tarp, behind the fence.

I have been building a boat, a ridiculous little boat. Lacking the shop space for my stored power tools, I have been using Lisa's grandmother's basement, twenty minutes away. Lisa's late grandfather built thirty-three fiberglass sailing dinghys in that basement, and the power tools he used have made my project easier. Even so, the space is cramped, and I mutter to his spirit when I repeatedly wrestle the table and band saws out of my way.

This is not the first boat I've built. My first boat was a "stitch and glue" affair that I had worked out myself in high school. Designed to be cut from a single sheet of plywood, wired together, the seams fiberglassed. I dubbed it the Banana Boat, for its squarish approximation of a certain tropical fruit. I had a working knowledge of how S&G boats went together. Dad brought home the plywood and fiberglass materials from work.

My friend, Eric, and I risked amputation cutting out the three pieces with a circular saw on the garage floor, and we dutifully assembled the hull with galvanized wire and a cross brace carved from a two by four. After mixing up the resin and hardener in a coffee can, we lay the fiberglass tape along the inside and outside of the joints and painted the polyester resin on the tape. After waiting a glacially slow day for the resin to "kick", we toted the Banana Boat down Willow road to the Bay.

The boat was a jaunty craft, about seven feet long, like a miniature cod-fishing dory. In the interest of expediency there was no trim, no paint. Ragged edges formed the gunwales, the only concession to comfort, the graceful arc carved into the cross-piece / backrest. I figured it would be best propelled by a kayak paddle like the Rushton canoes, but all we had was a cheap plastic two-piece oar that Eric carried in his hand. I hoisted the tiny craft onto a shoulder and we marched up the street.

The saltwater closest to my house was over and down a hill, a full mile away. On the walk to the Bay, I imagined my naval architecture career beginning with the record-breaking sales of plans and kits for the soon-to-be-famous Banana Boat. Every cruiser would want one. Birdwatchers, fishermen would appreciate the economy and safety of my brainchild. It might be written up in Popular Mechanics or Cruising World. After I had made enough money from my clever, elegant design, I would bequeath the boat into the public domain and Boy Scouts and inner-city children would build fleets. Of course, my trademark color would be yellow.

Once down by the Bay, we minced our way along the train tracks, looking for a suitable launch site. The rock and rubble of the railroad grade cut across a broad inlet, trapping a small backbay, washed by tides which ebbed and flowed under a short trestle where we occasionally netted crab . At the north end of the backbay, an aromatic black beach beckoned, but the occasion called for a mud-free launching. Balancing on a large rock out from the shore, I lowered one end - the stern- of the Banana Boat into the water, and slid the craft into the glassy swell.

The first indication of a poorly conceived and executed plan was the water seeping through pinholes in the fiberglass tape. I had watched, incredulous, as green water pooled in my boat, and it slowly rolled over. Dismissing the technical shortcomings of my boatbuilding, flush with faith that the design was sound (yet loathe to get wet), I performed an experiment. With the Banana Boat perched on a convenient flat rock, we hefted a large stone - maybe a hundred and fifty pounds - precisely positioning it in the middle of the boat.

Like a cheese on a grater, delicate curls of fir veneer testified to the destructive power of our methodology, as I levered the boat back into the brine. Holding the bow for a long moment, seeking the elusive balance that I hoped existed, the Banana Boat struggled in my hand like a frightened pony, fighting first to the left, then the right. It's just the waves I told myself, no waves in evidence. I released my steadying grip.

The Titanic had undoubtedly reached a point in its sinking where stability and bouyancy vanished and the forces of fate converged in a sucking slosh and the sea claimed the vessel. I understand this took some time, as depicted in Hollywood dramas. Perhaps scaling a Titanic to seven feet also scales time downward: Without hestation, bob, or wallow, my boat tipped on its side, the rock sliding to the chine. Water spilled into the hull, the boat continued its rotation, the stone settling to the bottom in an explosion of mud. Failure. Q.E.D.

A nascent social responsiblity prohibited me from abandoning a plywood hulk on the beach, but it had briefly occurred to me to sacrifice it upon the train tracks. During the long walk back up the hill, my mind was occupied by a new-found understanding of primary stability, rocker, and beam. I dragged the dangerous, useless Banana Boat behind me, the fiberglass scritching, shredding on the hot asphalt. Eric's house was closer than mine, and I tipped the hull onto a burn pile in his back yard. Eric handed me an ax, and I purged the disappointment from my soul.

I nearly gave up boatbuilding.

I was fortunate to attend a high school that offered, among other things, a sailing class. I took the class five times, learning to coax beautifully varnished El Toros to windward. I found the courage and funds to buy a home-built Jr. Moth from my Dad's coworker, Loy. The hard-chined scow needed some restoration, a confidence-building exercise in boat painting.

The next boat that I built was an Aleutian kayak, a baidarka, built to my body. Inspired by George Dyson's seminal book on building aluminum baidarkas, I carefully scaled the dimensions to fit my six-foot-two frame. I lashed dozens of alder saplings to spruce longitudinals, faithfully replicating methodology and materials. Nineteen feet long, twenty-two inches wide, crazy fast, and tight as a rubber glove, paddling it terrified me. I stripped the skin from it and sold it to a man building a hotel in Dutch Harbor, Alaska. I hear it hangs above the bar still, twenty years later.

I used the money from my baidarka to buy the Pelican behind the fence, which I named Reinheitsgebot. That boat required some varnishing, in addition to the paint. A pleasure to sail, with the tiller lashed down, it could be steered by shifting one's weight fore and aft.

The purchase of a San Juan 24 necessitated the construction of a Phil Bolger design called the Elegant Punt. We needed a dinghy, and the punt performed admirably, gracefully towing behind Solen, shuttling three safely to shore. Sadly, it was left behind when we moved to Vashon Island. I hope somebody saved it from crumbling away in the weather, tilted against the house.

Once again, I am happily surrounded by boats. Cacafuego, a San Juan 21, waits on its trailer, risking parking tickets on the street. One of Lisa's grandfather's thirty-three rests on saw horses in the back yard, sail and spars snug in the garage. She rescued it from a yard sale in Queen Anne, a hilltop neighborhood in Seattle.

The newest boat, Fósforo, is truly an absurdity. Six feet long, it is designed for a single adult occupant, yet I lavished the yachtiest attention to its construction. It has a sailing rig, and I hope my kids learn to enjoy small sailboats as I have.

I put the finishing touch of a name on the transom last night, and brought it home from the distant basement. The sun was low, playing on the Olympic horizon, and, yet, I had to put it into the water.

A dredged ship canal divides Seattle north and south, with a tiny, overlooked boat launch in Fremont. Geese loitered on the docks, hunkering in the breeze blasting off the water. I slid Fósforo into the chop, stepped in, grabbed the oars. I pushed away from the dock, drifting toward the concrete ramp. The oarlocks slipped into place, and I rowed away from shore, into the twilight.

Eight years ago, during a period of time I now refer to as The Retired Years, my son Alec and I made a pilgrimage of sorts, to Montana. I had grown up a thousand miles removed from the Big Sky, but had remained connected through biannual visits - road trips - to see my grandparents, uncles, aunts and a hundred unknown cousins. My grandparents, Rex and Grace, were celebrating their sixtieth anniversary, an event which would revolve around a prime rib dinner at a remote steakhouse. It would be an opportunity to shape my son's character with a few cultivated, fond memories.

I rented a Nissan SUV at the airport in Billings. I had a few ideas about this trip, and thought we might need four wheel drive. The first off-road opportunity presented itself on the lip of the Rimrock, above the city, when I pulled into the gravel parking lot of the Yellowstone County Museum. Housed in a genuine log cabin, the museum contained your standard historical museum fare, horse-drawn vehicles, the implements of land-clearing, an impressive chamberpot collection. I'll admit a small thrill went through me when, upon examining a case of handmade knives, I spied a yellow-handled specimen crafted by my Mom's brother, Uncle Bob, in Helena. Alec had never met Uncle Bob, but the glass box containing the stuffed two-headed calf was pleasant consolation.

Logan International Airport and the museum sit atop a plateau, from which, in warmer months, Billings, three hundred feet below, is a fluffy green carpet of shade trees, obscuring the streets and homes beneath. We had arrived several days before the anniversary, my intent being to have some father and son adventures before the familial commitments. I took a few moments, at the log cabin, to plunder a rack of brochures and pamphlets, which touted the region's many wonders. In the car, as we descended from the Rimrock, I slapped the stack in Alec's lap. Leafing through the information, Alec announced that he wanted to visit the zoo.

"Where is it?" The only zoo I knew of in Montana used to be in Red Lodge, which I had only visited once, decades ago, with my cousins. Rumor had it that is was finally closed down when the peacock and mule deer finally died. I took the pamphlet, steering with my knee along the edge of the precipice, and examined the tiny map, with an occasional glance to the road.

Interstate-90 barely kisses Billings, skirting the southern margin of civilization, with a wild river, campgrounds, range land, beckoning from the opposite side. Zoo Montana is conveniently located right beside this freeway, at exit 443, and I imagined long-haul truckers gratefully coasting down the off-ramp, with a mind to stretch their legs, to stroll from the bald eagles to the grizzlies, their last break having been Wall Drug, in South Dakota. We arrived in minutes, and parked at the outer edge, by a prairie dog colony dug into a landscaped berm.I assumed the prairie dogs were part of the zoo, but when I asked the girl at the ticket window about them, she hissed through her lipstick. "Pests! They're wild. We can't get rid of 'em, nothing works."

As zoos go, it was pretty modest. Deer were over-represented, and the local television station was taping a news item, surrounded by a pointing crowd, at a grotto where a new-born mountain goat kid was already leaping from concrete rock to concrete rock. Peacocks wandered freely, stalked by unsupervised children. At the black-footed ferret exhibit, we learned that prairie dogs were the prey of the endangered weasels, and I savored the irony of a solution to their parking lot pest problem, so close at hand. An enormous Siberian tiger lounged in the shade. Alec selected a mylar snake kite in the gift shop.

Back at the car, we watched the prairie dogs bob up and down in their burrows. Randomly, they'd pop up, look around, and scamper backwards into their hole if we spoke or moved. "I can catch one, you know..." I said it casually, waiting for Alec to bite.

"Watch me." I measured out some string from the reel of kite line, cutting it with my Leatherman. It took a moment to knot it into a noose. "I'm going to snare one." Alec looked around, torn between the mischief at hand and his inherent fear of getting in trouble. The parking lot was almost empty, as closing time approached. I could tell that he was weighing the various risks, but I knew he was game when his shoulders visibly relaxed.

My son watching, I arranged the loop around the closest hole, and carefully payed out the string as I backed away from the snare. We crouched on the asphalt, in the glare of the Montana sun, waiting for our an opportunity to bag our chosen prey. Several times, a prairie dog's head, presumably the same one, peeked out of the hole, only to instantly disappear. We waited, and I sensed Alec's patience for this endeavor evaporating. Then, at the mouth of the burrow, our prairie dog was standing full upright, our presence forgotten.

I yanked on the string, and the contest was on: the vigilant instincts of self-preservation pitted against the cunning intelligence of man, the hunter. I was confident that I'd be fast enough to catch the animal around his chest, but I pulled so sharply that the rodent flew through the air, snatched from its den with a squeak. It landed at our feet, and immediately scurried toward the safety of the dirt beside the parking lot. I reeled in the the slack line, pulling the prairie dog up short. The noose had tightened around its neck, and the animal darted sideways, describing a six-foot arc around us, scampering, squeaking.

"You're hurting it! You're hurting it!" Alec was dancing around, arms in the air, trying not to step on the frightened animal. I continued to reel it in, and eventually a foot of string separated the rodent and my hand. Concerned that the noose around its neck might choke it, I eased the tension on the line. The rodent crouched flat on the pavement, heaving from its recent exertion, resigned to death.

"You killed it!" His voice was shrill, and now I was nervously glancing around the parking lot.

"No, I didn't," I spoke calmly, in a low tone. Keeping the string in my hand taut, controlling the head, the biting end, I gently scooped up the animal with my other hand. It made no effort to defend itself, and I wondered if I had been able to catch it because it was sick, somehow diseased. It was tiny, just six inches long, a pup, and I felt a fleeting pang of guilt. "It's soft... Do you want to touch it? They make great pets, I hear."

"They carry diseases. I learned about it in school. They make horrible pets." Alec was backing away. "I can't believe you're touching it..." His face was bunched up into squinting disgust. Later, I read that prairie dogs do, indeed, carry diseases, among them tularemia and something known as monkeypox. Oh, and plague. Yes, that plague: the flea-borne pestilence that wiped out half of medieval Europe, the gruesome black death, characterized by buboes, swollen and infected lymph glands.

I released it at the opening to its burrow. It lay there for a moment, dazed, confused, possibly whispering a prairie dog prayer of thanks, and then - zip - it was gone. I wondered where I might wash my hands.

_____________________

We checked into a motel in Laurel, a crossroads of highway and railway, best remembered by the not-totally-unpleasant, sulphurous smell emitted by the oil refinery. For a brief time, in my early childhood (TheToddler Years) I lived there, but, mainly, I recall driving through Laurel, on the way to somewhere else, past the Owl Cafe, the iconic neon sign visible from the back seat of the Rambler. A quick trip to the IGA for "provisions" yielded another history lesson in the sepia-tone photographs of pioneer-era Laurel. Before paved roads, motorcars, running water, the town was a collection of unpainted Wild West buildings, surrounded by a sagebrush wasteland. As far as the camera could see. The grocery store visit was doubly satisfying when the checker carded me for the beer in my basket, causing me to speculate that, perhaps, thirty-six year old men work harder and age faster beneath a Montana sun.

Nobody knew we were already in the "Treasure State", and the next morning we enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at the Owl Cafe, soaking in the country music, panelled ambiance, gorging on cholesterol, in the form of perfect bacon and eggs. Montana, especially Carbon County, is world-renowned for its rich fossil record, and my secret plan for the day was to drive into the hills east of Bridger, for some rock hounding. We had to drive down the highway past the family farmstead, between Edgar and Fromberg. When we zoomed by, without stopping, it all began to feel a little sneaky.

We turned at the only stoplight in Bridger, crossed the river, and bounced along the dirt road, through miles of fenced land, posted "No Trespassing". Eventually, we encountered open range land and climbed out of the Nissan, by a creek (properly pronounced "crick"), hoping to find exposed fossils - anything, leaves, even - in the eroded banks. Clad in sandals, we stepped gingerly through the sagebrush, wary of ticks and snakes. The few patches of unvegetated rock proved to be igneous or metamorphic something or other, completely devoid of remains.

"You said there would be fossils."

"I know, and there are. Velociraptors, T. Rexes... snails. They just aren't here." The sun was nearly overhead and I was feeling like a genius for bringing the jug of water I had bought the night before. We took long gulps from the jug, cold water dribbling down our shirts. "Do you want to keep looking?"

"Naw. Maybe tomorrow. I'm getting hungry." It was agreed: maybe tomorrow. We headed back to town, a cloud of dust spiraling in our wake.

"Is that a snake?" I slowed as we drew closer to the object in the road. It was a snake, stretched straight out, like a short section of fat broom handle. We got out, and cautiously approached the dead reptile in the road. I wondered what the locals would think if they came upon us, poking at the roadkill. Word might get around. I imagined the story being repeated until it came caught up with me via my Uncle Ervin, who would shake his head, and ask, "Was that really you fooling with a dead snake?" He would shake his head, incredulous, "Never seen a dead snake before, I guess." We hadn't seen any other vehicles, no driveways to hidden houses, but I couldn't believe that I had run this animal over. It was recently dead, lacking the thick coating of dust any corpse would quickly accumulate on this road. There was certainly nothing of interest between these two hills to have distracted my attentiveness. Maybe I had killed it, if, perhaps, the pale green-brown serpent had been camouflaged by a trick of the sun .

I bent to pick it, grasping where the rattle met the tail. "Dad..." I lifted it and dangled it at arm's length, holding the limp body at eye level, regarding the dull, lifeless eyes. "DAD!" Slowly, the snake's mouth opened, wide, fangs out and downward, the body stiffening.

"Holy..." In the fraction of the moment it took for the snake to hit the ground, with a thud like a dropped, but armed, grenade, we dashed to opposite shoulders of the road, from where we surveyed each other, and the snake, in turn.

"SHIT!"

It lay on its side, mouth open, looking very much dead. I knew rattlesnakes were crafty, and this was clearly a trick, a ruse to teach a lesson to molesting humans. Rocks littered the ditch behind me, and I selected one, the size of a bowling ball, tipping it carefully, lest another snake lurked underneath. I approached the snake from the tail, and heaved the rock, underhand, in the direction of the head. It missed and rolled, wobbling, several feet before stopping. Acutely aware of my vulnerable toes, I hefted the stone and slowly advanced, eyes on the exposed fangs. I splayed my sandalled feet, hopefully beyond striking distance, thrust the rock out from my body, and released my grip, teetering with the sudden change in balance. The rock landed, with a soft crunch, squarely on the reptile's head.

"Why did you do that?" Alec remained at his post, on the side of the road.

"Watch." I unfolded my knife, pulled the tail taut, the dangerous teeth securely pinned under the rock, and sawed at the flesh until I held the rattle in my hand. It felt papery, and I gently rolled it between my fingers before tucking it into my shirt pocket for safe keeping. Mindful of the hazard I had created, I rolled the rock off the road with my foot.

We were back on the highway before I reached into my pocket, producing the hard-won rattle. "Do you want to hold it?"

"No," said Alec. I put it away, grimacing, making the same face my dad used to make when I was a kid. "Gross," he added.

_____________________

After another meal at the Owl Cafe, sandwiches this time, we found ourselves back in Billings. We tracked down the house on Princeton Avenue that my parents had purchased shortly before moving to Washington, when I was four years old. Tidy, clad in aluminum siding, I couldn't reconcile it with the image of the house my mom had described: stucco with parquet floors. It looked so ordinary, yet mom had been very proud; My parents had rented for years afterward, before they bought another home.

I wanted to knock on the door, but we remained in the car, and Alec leafed through the tourist information I had collected the day before. "What's Boot Hill Cemetery?" I vaguely recalled visiting a pioneer graveyard, years ago, with my grandparents. The tiny map on the leaflet showed the historical site just minutes away, and we found it easily enough, a low mount surrounded by gas stations, light industry, a muffler shop. According to the pamphlet, the highlight of the tour was the grave of Muggins Taylor, a military scout, who had carried the news of the 7th Calvery's defeat at Little Bighorn, all the way to the telegraph station at Bozeman. He had stumbled across the battle site, and discovered General Custer's body by accident.

Dating from 1877, originally the municipal cemetery of Coulson, MT, a town long gone, swallowed by modern-day Billings, Boot Hill rose gently above the highways on each of its three sides. The graveyard had all the ambiance of an abandoned lot, weedy, and abundantly populated by our new friend, the prairie dog. We strolled the well-travelled tracks between the graves, flushing grasshoppers, examining the leaning crosses, which had been fashioned from unusually dark boards, perhaps the product of a woodshop teacher or boy scouts. At some of the plots, the earth was slightly mounded, and I wondered how deeply the remains were interred, whether or not they were in coffins.

The prairie dogs, hard to see in the scrub, had been busy. Their tunnels were everywhere, excavated without regard to grave or path. An idea, repugnant at first, popped into my head: might a prairie dog inadvertently exhume an item of jewelry, a ring, for example? I stifled the tiny inner voice suggesting, "grave robbing", and toed the pile of dirt at the entrance to a burrow. It contained an assortment of pebbles, but yielded nothing of value. We ambled down the line, reading the dates on the markers.

One cross, engraved, Girl, 1889 - 1892, caught my attention. Who was this three-year old, and exactly which of the hundreds of possible ends did this pioneer child meet? Typhus? Smallpox? A trampling by buffalo? The grave was obviously smaller than the others, and delineated by a slightly different, sparser, vegetation. In the middle of the hump, a prairie dog had deposited a conical pile of soil around the entrance to its warren, a moon crater in miniature.

Alec wandered away, clearly bored. I stepped forward, beside the tiny grave, keeping an eye on my son, the morning's rattlesnake fresh in my memory. The burrow appeared to angle steeply downward when I peered into the opening of the animal's den. Stooping, the pile of debris was easy to reach, and I sifted through it with my fingers. In addition to the numerous squarish, dice-sized stones and dirt clods, two items surfaced, yellowed, ancient. I plucked them from the scattered pile, standing up.

"Dad? What are you doing?" Alec had wandered back to where I had stopped.

"Look, bones." I thrust out my palm, stepping forward.

"Bones? Human bones? Gross!" I was getting tired of hearing that word. So, how was your visit to Montana, Alec? Answer: Gross. So far, the baby cow with two heads, back at the museum, was the highlight of this trip.I withdrew my hand, and examined the fragments. "I'm pretty sure this one's a patella, you know, a kneecap. This other one," holding it up, in the sun, "I think it's from the wrist or ankle." I slide them into the pocket with the snake rattle. Aside from almost being bitten by a venomous reptile, I was fairly pleased with the day's yield.

"Dad, that was a person," he gaped at me, arms akimbo, "and now she's in your pocket. Gross."

I changed the subject: "You hungry?"

_____________________

Meals with the relatives promised copious beef, and I half-way dreaded meating up with them. Driving around Billings, seeking an alternative, I passed up the steak houses, burger shacks. A thousand miles from any ocean, common sense suggested that we forgo the restaurant that Alec spotted, with the neon "sushi" sign in the window. The parking lot was packed, which bode well; the wait for a table was brief.

The menu offered Korean, Japanese, and Chinese dishes, much like the place where I first tasted sushi, and I was pleasantly surprised that the seats were mostly filled by people of an Asian persuasion. We waited for our edamame and, furtively, I fished the bones out for another look.

The carefree days I hoped to have for covert adventure had slipped away. We were racing in the Nissan, past irrigated circles of green, soldiered ranks of enormous idle tractors, to find the "Feedlot" (really) steakhouse, in tiny Shepherd, Montana. Literally at a crossroads on the way to somewhere else, this steakhouse was legendary in the Billings area, and my family's relationship to beef cattle made it an obvious choice for an anniversary banquet. Played upon the scale of the Big Sky landscape, my innate propensity to dawdle and lack of planning found me late again.

Ultimately, I drove too far in one direction, and then in another. With gazetteer in lap, I circled in on the restaurant like a plane making its final approach. The parking lot was full and, ushered by a smiling hostess, we slunk into the banquet room to find everyone already seated. That we were in sport coats with ties, while the majority of men wore jeans and colorful, striped rodeo shirts only served to magnify our tardiness. We took the empty seats reserved for us and thick slabs of prime rib were placed before us.

Considered numerically, most of my family - certainly my Dad's family - live in Montana. A long time ago, I appreciated how risky and rebellious it was for my parents to move a thousand miles away from family and farm. Not that my Dad ever had much interest in farming, but I believe it made a firm statement about self-determination and Independence. Looking back, I relish the memories of growing up in Bellingham, but I sense that there is a void in my being which is only filled when I am in this wild place, surrounded by these strong people.

When my parents opted to live "on the coast", by the "ocean", I think they forged a tiny personal legend, a small epic tale in the minds of Montana friends and family. Many times, when I was young, I patiently explained to cousins and kids that I lived in the other Washington, the state. I related how I attended school with hundreds of children, ina world where rain fell abundantly, absent the dramatic climatary extremes under a Big Sky. My daily life was so different, so alien, my values tempered by "city living" and liberal politics, I felt like a curious oddity.

You're Larry's boy?" Across from me, a weathered man I did not recognize. "This must be Alex. I hear you can make a frog sound."

There it was; I knew this was coming. In the minds of my kin I had been reduced to an interloper with a dubious talent, my own personal legend elicited in my very first conversation at the table. I strained to put a name to his face.

"I'm sorry," I said, extending my hand over the beef, "I'm afraid I don't..." Growing up, much of my peripheral family existed primarily as binary abstractions, paired with the names of siblings or spouses: Lowell and Lyle, Leo and Buela, Howard and Joanie. When he explained who he was I was able to conjure his wife's name from some dusty corner of my brain.

Truth be told, sometimes I can still make the frog sound, but it's a geriatric frog with arthritis, not the bright, shrill spring peeper my youthful vocal cords once produced. In fifth grade, I rode the train to Montana alone, and entertained myself with the sounds of inexplicable amphibians in the club car. My long-lost second uncle related this story to the table, essential details intact, only embelishing the narrative with a train porter (pantomiming a wide-eyed comic black man) trying in vain to find the frog.

"Yep, that's pretty much how it happened," I allowed. Crap. I am still that feller from Warshington who can make a frog sound.

"Well, what have you boys been doing in Montana?" Not wanting to divulge that we had arrived early, I mentioned the sights we had seen in Billings, omitting the rattlesnake episode in the hills. Perhaps Alec's face twisted in horror, which might have prevented me, had I looked, from: first, sharing the details of our visit to Boot hill cemetary, and second, producing actual human remains at the dinner table.

"Huh... Well, that is something." Judging by reactions, I gather I am now the graverobber from Warshington who can make a frog sound.

_____________________

We moved outside to a stone patio for pictures after the meal. Gammpa was sitting in a chair against the wall, in the light of the dipping sun.

"It's Doctor IQ," He's called me that since I can remember. "Did you have some trouble finding the place?"

"Yeah, sort of. Gramma gave me directions..."

"Are you going to blame your Gramma?" Like a slap.

"No." Chastened, I glanced downward. I was going to blame my Gramma: at the last minute I had asked her how to get there, and she had only the vaguest idea. "I was running late and tried to wing it. I didn't realize how far it was."

"Well, you found it. You and Alex."

_____________________

After posing in some group photographs, I wandered over to where my cousins were gathered around a cold firepit. Unlike my uncles and aunts - my temperate older relatives - they clutched bottles of beer and cocktails, swirling the ice in the plastic cups between sips. As the eldest grandchild (The Solitary Years), I had always found myself stuck between the generations, relating more to the parents of my younger cousins. These people were adults now, and they seemed like more fun than the stern stock of farm folk that spawned them.

We chatted and laughed in the evening air, swatting at mosquitoes. I balmed my tension with an ice-cold Martini in a Dixie cup. The kids were playing tag in the parking lot, and I could hear Alec's laugh as he evaded capture.

_____________________

I stopped at the cemetary, at the base of the Rimrock, on the way to the airport. Alec looked at me, skeptically.

"What are we doing?"

"C'mon, you'll see."

He trudged behind me, watching as I stooped to pick up a stick in the dirt. It took a couple of minutes to find the grave marked "Girl". I pulled the tiny bones from my pocket and dropped them into the prairie dog burrow, pushing them deep into the hole with the stick. With my sandalled foot, I carefully collapsed the opening and smoothed the soil over the surface.

When we got back to the Nissan, Alec said, "Thanks, Dad. I'd hate it if you were haunted the rest of your life."

"Man down 2514 Empire st between pickup and blue car reporting party on scene."

Engine 43 covers an area comprised of an industrial waterfront, unaffordable homes on the bluff, and a portion of downtown, a colorful mix of decaying hundred year-old brick structures and newer construction. Historical buildings, vestiges of the lumber boom, some dating to the 1800's, house enterprises hawking cell phones, video games, and incensed New Age supplies. Cross the street, go next door; if you need auto parts, a sandwich, or a valve for a boiler system, you will find that too. Sleek banks rub shoulders with apartments, bump elbows with churches. The courthouse and the jail dominate their landscaped blocks with authoritative institutional concrete architecture. Sprinkled around the City, like candles on a cake, are the various huts promising drive-through convenience and Cafe Latte of dubious pedigree.

Taverns and hipster watering holes are abundantly represented in the business district, as are their patrons, some of which constitute a steady stream of repeat business for the fire department. We find them in doorways, alleys, parking lots, the waypoints of the ambitious alcoholic's business travel. It's hard work, poisoning your body, and a short nap might be required, demanded even, on the stumbled path to elsewhere. Rare is the shift that we aren't dispatched to a man down, often called in by an anonymous do-gooder on a cell phone, from a passing car.

The call to the Empire Street address was unusual, not for the time of day (2300 being a drunk's witching hour), but because we don't usually see this issue in the nicer neighborhoods, peripheral as they are to the commerce of intoxication. Brian, my captain, was suspicious that this was, once again, "Lieutenant Dan", a recently-arrived career inebriate. Lt. Dan, named after the character in Forrest Gump, lacks both legs, but, in his wheelchair, enjoys a vexing mobility. En route to 2514 Empire, our dispatcher verified, via a call back to the reporting party, that this patient was indeed possessing of both legs.

As we approached the address, someone stepped into the street, waving a flashlight, continuing even as we rolled to stop next to the aforementioned pickup. Brian trained the spotlight on the young man sitting cross-legged in front of the truck, and I stepped out, grabbing the kits from behind my seat.

Nicely dressed, this kid wasn't the bum I had expected, but flecks of vomit stained his shirt, clung to his cropped hair. "What's going on?" I asked, snapping the aid kit open. Gregg, our driver, joined me, adjusting the stocking cap on his shaved head.

"Where's my buddies?"

"I'd say they left you." I clipped the Oh-Two meter to a clean finger, "What's your name?"

"Jake."

"Been drinking?" (I have to ask.)

"Oh, yeah."

"What city are you in?" It's a standard question, intended to assess a patient's orientation to location, and I'll give the really drunk ones partial credit if they're in the right county.

"Uh... San Diego?"

Our captain was listening to the exchange, writing his report in the warmth of the engine's cab, "Ha! Try a place that's a little colder."

It was a surprising answer, but after the 22 year-old haltingly explained that he lived and worked on an aircraft carrier, hailed from a small town in Wisconsin, and remembered precisely where his parents and siblings lived, I gave him the benefit of my doubt. Gregg and I quickly worked together, collecting vital signs, which I relayed to my captain, standing below his open window.

I turned at the sound of retching, to see "Jake" vomiting copiously on the asphalt. The street gently sloped toward the gutter, and a tide of puke was flooding toward his pleated jeans. Ah... shit. Grabbing an elbow and his belt, I hoisted him to higher ground, preserving his remaining cleanliness and dignity.

"What did you have for dinner? Spaghetti-O's?" I am such a card.

"No. Nothing."

"Looks like you enjoyed a few appetizers..." The humor in the situation suddenly evaporated as the smell slammed into my brain. A hearty dinner of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, tenderly prepared by the medics, bubbled heavily in my stomach, boiled up, into the foreground of my awareness. I fought to contain the rising gorge and stepped into the cold breeze, inhaling deeply through my nose.

I stood upwind, at a distance, keeping an eye on my patient, waiting with my crew for the requested ambulance. The aid kit - my aid kit - lay open on the grass strip beside the curb, yawning up to the night sky, but I could collect it, and the airway kit, from the hot zone later.

Jake began to heave again, and, concerned that he might inhale vomitus, aspirate, Gregg and I moved in to steady him, holding his shoulders. Another fountain of pungent spew splattered on the pavement, and we clutched at his clothing, lifting him away from the viscous mess. Distracted by the task at hand, I gave no thought to my previous nausea. And suddenly, standing there without focus, awash in that foul air, I was visited anew by the angry ghost of meatloaf past.

Gregg fetched a towel to clean up Jake, dabbing at his face and shirt. I removed myself for another dose of fresh air. The ambulance arrived, and our captain described the situation to the EMT's.

"What exactly is his medical complaint?" It was an asshole question. Granted, I wouldn't want him in the back of my AMB either, but this patient clearly deserved transport, and, I thought, a little respect.

Gregg spoke up, "He's at risk for acute alcohol poisoning."

One more time, we entered the ralph zone to scoop Jake up and onto the stretcher, positioning him on his side lest he vomit again. The AMB guys wrapped him in a blanket, and buckled the straps, while Gregg retrieved the kits.

We climbed up into the warm cab. The ambulance pulled around us and then pulled over, presumably to take their own vitals and call the hospital. Gregg reached up and flipped the switch for the emergency lights. A few minutes later, Engine 43 was back in the barn. I wandered toward the kitchen, hoping to satisfy a mysterious craving for noodles in tomato sauce.

Aid 42 was dispatched to a tidy brick Tudor, in the north end of the City, for a Lifeline alert, 85 year old female, assist up. We are searching, in the dark, for a hidden set of house keys. On arriving, we had received supplemental information, via the data terminal in the aid car, instructing us to retrieve the keys from under a loose brick in the "fire pit". A survey of the brick fireplace, positioned at the corner of a slimy cedar deck, revealed nothing but secure, well-mortared masonry. A chain-link fence crowds the brick structure on two sides, and I wedge my bulk into the gap, fingering the few broken bricks on the ground, finding nothing but spiders underneath.

A call for an Assist Up is not an emergency, but if we can't find the keys, we will have to force our way inside the house. Prying a door open with the Halligan bar causes certain damage to the framing, costs the homeowner money, and, most importantly, if the keys are here, makes me look foolish. This is taking too long.

I stand up, "Here, take the flashlight. Try looking inside the fireplace." A pair of door mats are draped over the front of the outdoor fireplace, and Eric flips them out of the way.

"Got 'em." I'm still wriggling out from behind the brickwork, but I hear them jingle in the quiet night.

The backdoor unlocks easily enough, but the entry to the kitchen is barred by another locked door. The keys are corroded and all three, tried in turn, resist sliding into the keyhole.

"Dang it. Let's try the front."

Eric fumbles with the keys again, and, when he runs through the whole set a fourth time, I am tempted to snatch them out of his hands in frustration. The door, however, finally swings open with a creak. Secretly, I suspect that we could have gone through the back door.

There are some interesting, parenthetical aspects of this career. Aside from meeting people, (occasionally lucid) in various states of undress, or finding yourself, unknowingly, in a conversation with the deranged, we are invited to enter people's homes, suddenly, and without advance warning. When Grandpa has the crushing chest pain, Grandma probably isn't going to take time to tidy up. We might find a terrified mother, holding her post-ictal child, surrounded by diapers, toys, and laundry, the whirlwind chaos of her family's life. It's tempting to judge people by their housekeeping, but there are days when I know I could not suffer such scrutiny gracefully.

Hygiene, however, is fair game. I've been in homes (plural), where wheeling a sick person out the door on the gurney required a forward spotter, directing your steps around the numerous piles of dog shit on the carpet. Then there's the recent legend concerning a mad woman, living on her own, in a ramshackle house. Someone called 911 on her behalf, and the responding fire engine crew discovered a complete dog's skeleton on the floor, behind the couch. Decomposed, over time, in situ.Yurph.

Another frequent facet of this job is repeated visits to the same address. Often, this is the hallmark of a system abuser, exploiting the fire department's mission, in a quest for pain killers, "free" rides to the hospital, or maybe, simply, some attention. The Department continues to refine its policies for dealing with this problem, but one abuser is eventually replaced by another. Sometimes, though, a repeat visit is the eventual product of probability, or just plain, dumb, bad luck.

A few weeks ago, working on Engine 41, we were dispatched to a fall: possible leg, hip fracture. We found our patient, flat on her back, on an icy deck behind the house, shivering beneath a heavy overcoat and assorted blankets. When she told us her name, the same as someone else I know, I remembered seeing her a year ago when she broke her ankle. This time she had slipped, and, evidently, broken her femur in the fall. Normally, the femur is a tremendously strong bone, and typically breaks during incidents involving a tremendous transfer of energy, like an MVC, a motor vehicle collision. This lady, however, possessed both tremendous bulk and an unfortunate osteoporosis. Given the realities of pulling traction on her leg, on a frictionless surface, and hefting her, first onto a gurney, and then into the back of a medic unit, I can't say it was great to see her again. Both falls occurred outside her house, on the same deck, and the quality of her domestic management remains a mystery.

Now, with Eric, I find myself standing in another home to which I have been previously dispatched. I vaguely remember a warm conversation between my captain of that day, Uncle Ronnie, and a woman, his classmate from high school. I can't recall the reason we had gone there, but the house had been tidy, comfortable. We step into a scene entirely different from that hazy memory.

To our right, in a commandeered dining room, is a double bed. The furniture elsewhere seems to have spawned a crazy, peripheral clutter, in an effort to colonize the open space in middle of the room. On the floor, between a walker and a wheelchair, lies an elderly woman, like a placid turtle, on her back. We bend over her, like vultures over carrion. She is surrounded by scattered envelopes and papers. I speak slowly, loudly, "Are? You? Alright?" She nods happily. "What's your name?"Her name is Mabel, and in a heartbeat, she is in our hands and hoisted to her feet. Her Lifeline pendant, a sleek medallion, dangles around her neck. Touching the button alerts a dispatch center which responds by calling back to the home through a (loud) speakerphone. Lifeline undoubtedly handles most of their false alerts, but when they can't determine the problem or contact the subscriber, they call us. and we half-expect to find nothing seriously wrong when we arrive. This is looking to be just another Assist Up, but when she reaches, teetering, for the walker's handles, arthritic hands shaking, clawing, my concern increases.

"Are you sure that you're okay?" Her spine is bowed almost horizontal at her neck, and I'm on one knee, at eye level with her. "What happened?"

"Oh, yes. I just fell while I was... I was maneuvering." She smiles a broad smile, and I'm reminded of a jolly Jack-O-Lantern, her missing teeth outnumbering the remaining ones.

I ask her to squeeze my fingers. Her grip is weak, but symmetrical. "Are you normally...", more delicately, "Do you..." Screw it. "Is this normal for you?"

"Yes, but I'm fine." That smile again. I'm concerned about a possible stroke, but every stroke victim I have ever met was terrified by some sudden affectation: a headache, an inability to move or communicate, even voices in their head. She watches me patiently.

"Have you ever had a stroke?" A history of prior stroke increases the likelihood of future strokes, but might also explain some of the deficits we are seeing. The signs and symptoms of stroke are fresh in my head, having just delivered a stroke training module to dozens of my brothers, over the last week.

"Oh, yes. Oh-one, July. Horrible." And yet she's smiling. "My left leg don't work so good now. That's why I moved in with my daughter. She's at work til two." I look over at Eric, but he's already unpacking the tools to measure blood pressure, oxygen saturation, blood sugar. Simple assists up don't normally require the completion of paperwork, but if we take vital signs, I will need to write a report.

Do you want to go to the hospital?" The six hundred dollar question.

Oh, no. I'm fine." I want to believe her, but the circumstances smell a little fishy. A trip to the emergency room can be expensive, a trivial concern in a genuine emergency. However, lying on a hospital bed for hours, unnecessarily, waiting for attention, waiting for a ride home, these things worry me.

"Can we call your daughter?" I can't leave this woman at home if I have any doubts as to her health, and I have a few doubts. I motion to Eric to hold the wheelchair, and we move her to a seated position. Stethoscope in his ears, he inflates the blood pressure cuff with the rubber bulb in his hand.

"Well... Penny works til two. You can't call her at work. Sandra - she lives five blocks away." Her words come slowly, deliberately. (Eric announces her BP and blood sugar: both unremarkable.)

"Sandra? Can we call Sandra? Do you know her phone number?" She rattles off the number before I am ready, stressing the last two digits with a rising inflection: "Two. Niiiiiine." She repeats the number for me, and Eric jots it down on the back of his nitrile glove, smiling when she sings the last two digits again, pitch-perfect. Eric dials and gets an answering machine, but leaves no message.

I explain my concerns, and that we couldn't reach Sandra on the telephone. Mabel admits that her daughter usually goes to bed early. "How well do you know your neighbors?" I envision knocking on someone's door, trying to explain the situation, on the porch, in my uniform, but she reels off another phone number, rapid-fire, before I am ready.

"That's Annette. She lives... right next door." She repeats the number, and it's like listening to a tape recording, again delivered in the same tone and rhythm. Her memory, at least, seems to be intact.

Eric dials and someone answers. "Is this Annette? Hi. This is Eric with the fire department. Do you know Mabel?" He explains the situation carefully, stressing that we don't think this is an emergency, but we need some outside confirmation. A few minutes later, the neighbor is in the room with us, wearing a green wool jacket with brass buttons, like she just got home from church or a dinner party. She's chats with Mabel, leaning down. I watch the conversation closely, looking for signs that Annette is distressed by our patient's condition, but they shoot the breeze casually, if a little slowly, discussing daughters, weather, and the handsome firefighters in Mabel's living room. I'm filling in the blanks on my report, fleshing out the narrative. Eric packs up the kits.

Annette turns to me, "I think she's fine. This is completely normal."

We set to tidying up the mess created in the fall. Mabel has a system for keeping medications, bills, letters close at hand, much of it piled on top of a footstool, overturned when she went down. She is very particular, directing Eric to place her medications, just-so, by the phone. She keeps a glass of water, half-full, by the pills, and another in the basket on her walker.

"Seems a little precarious to me." The footstool is designed to rock and I wobble it experimentally.

"I..." She's scooting the wheelchair with her right foot, "Maneuver."

I explain the required signatures on my report, and Mabel, pen in her gnarled hand, signs with a flawless script, the kind I could never master. Annette thanks us for calling her, and after signing as a witness, offers to help get Mabel ready for bed. We say goodnight, and we're out the door.

Eric takes the kits to the aid car. I return the keys to their hiding place behind the house, in the dark, and Aid 42 is in service.

Many years ago, a young man was driving around the city where I work, late at night, looking for a place to stay. His grandmother had died just two days before, and the funeral was to be held in a couple of days. He was only one day into a three-day cross-country trip, and already he was exhausted.

Neon taunted him from the signs outside every Motel: "NO VACANCY". In order to make the funeral, he would have to get up and be on the road by five in the morning. It was getting late.

Thump. Thump. Thump. Suddenly his car began pulling to the right, and the man suspected he had a flat tire, and so, pulled over. Even in the dark, his tire was obviously ruined. With a sigh, he grabbed his hat, buttoned his coat, and prepared to change the wheel in the rain.

Methodically, he removed his luggage from the trunk, putting it in the rear seat of his sedan to keep it dry. He pulled out the tire iron and jack, setting them on the ground, by the bad wheel. Upon hefting the spare wheel out of the trunk, he realized that the tire had gone flat over time, in the years it had lain there.

Leaning against the car, he looked around the gloom. Several tidy houses were nearby, but no lights were on. The few businesses in the neighborhood had been closed for hours. Across the street, however, was a fire station. Lights burned in the windows, and shadowy shapes could be seen moving, behind the blinds.

At the front door, he rang a doorbell, and moments later, a young firefighter opened the door and ushered him in, out of the weather. Dripping in the foyer, the man related the problem with his spare tire. Just then, an older firefighter, wearing a white shirt, poked his head around the corner.

"Everything alright out here?"

"No, sir. This gentleman needs a tow truck. His spare tire is flat."

"Nonsense. It just needs air." The chief stepped into the entrance, and the young man noticed that he was wearing slippers. "Probie, fill this man's tire."

The young firefighter dashed out into the storm, and the chief shook hands with the man. "Come in, come in. Have you eaten?"

When the man admitted that he hadn't, the officer ushered him into the kitchen. A delicious aroma lingered in the air, and several firefighters were sitting around the table, talking over hot chocolate. They quieted when the pair entered.

"This fellow needs a hot meal!" He barked the words, but he winked sideways at the young man. The firefighters jumped up and scurried: one to the refrigerator, one to the pantry, and one to the cupboard. By the time the man had removed his soaking wet coat and hat, a plate of hot food and a mug of cocoa were placed before him.

A surge of emotion, memories came over the man, and he realized two things: he was ravenous, and never before had he smelled anything so tantalizing. In between bites, he told the chief about his grandmother, about the motels, about his desperation. As he ate, he began to believe that everything was going to be okay, and a great peace befell him, a contentment he'd never before felt.

"Well, don't you worry about finding a room. You can stay here tonight ...If you don't mind the occasional fire alarm." When the young man started to slowly shake his head, "Nope. I insist. You'll be my guest. We have a couple of spare beds, upstairs, in the ward... don't take the one next to Hicks, though - he snores!" chuckling.

The man had to know, "What did I just eat? That was the most amazing thing I have ever tasted, but I have no idea what it was."

At that moment, the firefighter who had answered the door entered the kitchen. "Tire's all fixed, sir. I put it on for you, and it should be fine, for a few days, at least."

The chief explained that the traveler would be sleeping in the ward, and sent the probie to help the man fetch his luggage. Outside, the man asked the probie about the dinner.

"Can't tell you unless you're a fireman." At the car, smiling against the cold rain, he took both suitcases from the man. "Sure is good, though, isn't it?"

"Sure is. Say, what's it take to become a fireman?"

The firefighter set down the luggage, and looked directly at the man for a moment, the rain soaking his hair, his uniform.

"Sir, I'll tell you, it's the best thing I have ever done. You'll need to take tests, written tests, and physical ability tests, some grueling. You'll also need to pass oral examinations, attend interviews, get a medical evaluation... If you're hired, you'll spend a year or more, on probation, at the bottom of the heap, doing the housework, all the dirty jobs. You'll see astounding things, horrible things. In that time, you have to win the respect, love, and trust of all your brothers. When that happens, you're a fireman." He picked the suitcase up again, and headed across the street, back to the station, in the downpour.

That night, the man had difficulty falling asleep. The flavors and texture, the smell and colors of his meal, the kindness of these men, filled his thoughts. The next thing he realized, the probie was gently shaking him awake.

"The shower's running. I'll have breakfast waiting when you come down. How do you take your coffee?"

All that day, and the next, on the road the young man could only think about becoming a firefighter. At the funeral, his family asked him about his life, his job. He told them he had decided that he was going to become a firefighter. When he got home, he began visiting fire departments, asking around about fire service tests. He began to study fire science and emergency medicine. He worked for an ambulance company. And he continued to take tests. Finally, he was invited in for an oral board, and ranked on a hiring list. He waited for the call, but it never came, and so he continued to take tests. More oral boards, more interviews, still taking every fire department test he heard about.

One day, three years after his flat tire, he got the call he had been waiting for. He was offered a provisional position, as firefighter, pending a medical evaluation and background check. He passed with flying colors, and became the newest firefighter, a probie, in his department.

He worked very hard, always trying to save others time and effort. When there was work to be done, he was the first to start, that last to finish, whistling, a smile on his face. He cleaned toilets, dishes, fire engines, equipment, and worked tirelessly in the kitchen to feed his crew.

At last the day came, when his chief called him into his office, handed him the recipe, and patiently explained the finer points. On that day, the secret of the food that he had tasted years before was entrusted to him: the ingredients, the preparation, the seasoning, even the proper cookware...

Whenever the subject of the contest came up, the mispronunciation peppered my speech like cayenne in a cookie.

"I'm going to win duriation aloft."

"The world record for duriation is eighteen seconds."

"These flaps, right here, they give you a longer flight duriation."

Between recess and lunch, we had writing, which was actually mostly spelling. The week before, everyone scored a hundred on the test, and, as a reward, Mister Wayerski announced that our class would have a paper airplane contest. He produced a huge paperback book, entitled The Great International Paper Airplane Book, about a famous contest held by a magazine called Scientific American, way back in the late sixties.

He passed the book around the classroom and explained the four events: duration aloft, distance flown, aerobatics and origami. We would learn to spell aeronautical terms, and write about our airplanes. At this, a collective groan rose from the class, but I was distracted, leafing through the magnificent book, turning the giant pages, examining the winning designs. I know I tried to pay attention, but that must have been when I confused the pronunciation of the word meaning "length of time".

After that, every recess and lunch, I stayed inside the classroom, poring over the book, mulling which tournaments to enter. I dismissed the origami competition, as being meaningless, beneath my dignity - these planes didn't even need to fly. Aerobatic entries would be judged by a panel of students, scored on the intricacy of their flight, and variety of maneuvers performed.

True, honest, objective data would determine the winners of distance and duration. I suspected distance flown would boil down to the thrower's skill and strength. Me, I could barely throw a baseball. If I wanted to win (and I truly did, with all my heart), I would have to focus on the duriation aloft event. The instructions for folding the original winning design were included in the book, and I studied, practiced, and made it my own. I invented a clever, and, apparently novel, trick for forming the difficult initial folds required by the plans.

The day before the competition, after the morning recess, Mister Wayerski pulled me aside. My fifth grade teacher, with his mutton chops, reminded me of Burt Reynolds, and I knew he tried really hard to be the fun teacher at Happy Valley. I had heard that he used to be a P.E. teacher, a rumor supported by the games he taught us to play, on the grass right outside our classroom door.

He laid a hairy hand on my shoulder and leaned in, whispering, "What's your best..." He paused, looking around, conspiratorially, "...duration, so far?" He drew the word out into three long syllables. Oh... I get it.

I appreciated this kindness, but my face went hot anyway. My glasses, the frames a regrettable tortoiseshell pattern, began to fog, especially the thicker lens on the right, the eye with the astigmatism. I blankly looked up at him, his toothy smile hazily framed by his thick sideburns. I didn't know any other adults with sideburns. His were like black carpet.

"Come on, you can tell me. I can keep a secret."

"Um... I don't know. I don't have a stopwatch."

"Hmmm. Well, we'll have to find out." He released my shoulder, straightening up. I took this as a signal to take my seat. When everyone was seated, he waited for us to quiet down.

"I know we're supposed to have a spelling test today..." He had our rapt attention.

Mister Wayerski explained that we would be having a flight trial, a practice run, for the actual contest the next day. We had thirty minutes in which to create our entries, starting with a standard sheet of notebook paper, after which, the whole class would march up to the gymnasium to test them out. I took my time, folding carefully, ironing the creases perfectly flat with the side of a number two pencil. Using blunted safety scissors, I carefully cut identically matched flaps into the rear edge of the wings, and holding the plane up at eye level, I confirmed an absolute symmetry from all directions. After a few test flights, steady glides between the rows of desks, I was ready.

I used the remaining time to spy on my chief rival, Rick Lenaburg. Rick was not someone you would peg as a strong student. No one, except, possibly, his fawning toady, Tod Cernitch, would have considered copying from any of his tests. However, on matters important, Rick was the undisputed authority. If you were waffling between the Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle or the Six Million Dollar Man Action Figure, ask Rick. He dominated bombardment, our playground dodge-ball game, delivering stinging attacks, the thrumming, crimson ball jouncing off your head or back. If you needed a BB gun, he was your man. Rick was a fearless BMX pioneer, jumping a bicycle he had built from spare parts. He once broke his collarbone, leaping from the climber on the playground, using his coat as a makeshift hang-glider, in a sixty-knot wind. If anyone could make a winning paper airplane, Rick Lenaburg could.

Curiosity, edged with nervous awe, propelled me to his desk, where sat three paper planes, to my one. Proudly, he showed me a sleek dart, wings folded repeatedly to the thickness of a ruler, clearly intended to dominate the distance category. I knew I was eyeing a champion. The second airplane, he told me, was an accident.

"When I throw this one, it spirals and loops - crazy! And, I figured... 'What the heck'?" So, an aerobatic entry, too. Rick, grinning, was more excited by this classroom activity than I could ever remember.

The final paper dart on his desk appeared identical to mine. Indistinguishable. I spun my head to verify that my entry was still on my desk where I had left it. It was. Any confidence I had felt, just moments before, drained from me like air from a leaking balloon. My face was hot again, my shoulders sagged.

"Well, good luck, Rick."

"Yeah, you too."

I returned to my desk, and sat, staring at my plane, and, suddenly, it was time. We gathered up our airplanes. Our teacher quietly led us, single-file, out the classroom door, through the resource center, - for reasons unknown, that's what they called the library - and up the ramp, to the gym.

It went quickly, Mister Wayerski imposing an improvised order on the proceedings. The origami portion was omitted, to "preserve originality". Of course, we went in alphabetical order, by last names. I thought Rick's aerobatic performance was the best, but, because it crashed into the floor, most of the class voted for Rhonda Calvin . Lined up along one wall, between folded lunch tables, the distance competitors took turns hurling their planes across the gym. As expected, Rick won, beating the next-best effort by twenty feet, almost hitting the far wall.

Few students, vying for duration aloft, were able to exceed eight seconds of flight. From the center of the basketball court, planes were thrown straight up, some falling back, straight down, barely missing the thrower. Rick took his turn, crouching like a coiled spring, his plane brushing the linoleum. At the end of the countdown, he exploded upwards, sneakers off the floor, arms windmilling. His plane described a tight loop fifteen feet above his head. It looked like it might loop again, but, lacking airspeed, it stalled and settled into a slow, dipping glide that carried it under the basketball hoop. When it touched down, Mister Wayerski clicked the stopwatch with an exaggerated chop of his arm.

"Twelve-point-five seconds." Crap.

I tried to duplicate Rick Lenaburg's athletic, off-balance launch, but the stance was awkward. I relaxed into a more-natural pose and, at the signal, pitched my glider with a grunt. Our planes' common pedigree was evidenced by similar, looping flights. After a heart-stopping stall, my plane, too, nosed into gentle, undulating descent. I held my breath, fists clenched, contorting my body, bowler-like, as if some kind of tormented physical effort might prolong the flight.

The plane hit the wall, with a crisp snap, four feet above the rubber baseboard. For a I moment, I believed it might glance off, fantastically remaining aloft. We watched it skid down the wall, crashing, thud, as Mister Wayerski dropped his arm again. I exhaled slowly, cheeks puffing.

"Eleven seconds."

I retrieved my plane, crumpling it in between my palms. Second place was still losing, but I wrung some satisfaction from beating Tod Cernitch, who, surprisingly, scored a 10.5. I suspected he used a plane built by Rick, to their mutual benefit. I was sick of paper airplanes. Our teacher congratulated the winners as the bell for the first lunch period rang. We hurriedly collected our lunches from the classroom, reconvening in the gym, now arrayed with the folding tables.

When Bob, the bus driver, dropped me off, I ran home, my backpack bouncing on my shoulders. After gulping from a carton of cold milk in the fridge, I fished a stack of paper from the double drawer in mom's desk. Kneeling at a side table, a stylish shade of avocado, molded from sturdy plastic, I set to the task of producing a squadron of duplicate paper airplanes. I knew, intuitively, that the key to the design's success lay in the details of the flaps.

Mom was in the kitchen, making spaghetti, and I excitedly detailed the drama of the paper airplane contest. Patiently, I explained my experiment, the comparison of different aileron sizes, the little paper flaps that inexplicably affected both the glide ratio and initial altitude.

"Too much lift, and the plane will loop too much... Less lift and it will fly higher, but it won't stay in the air long enough." I was thinking out loud.

Spaghetti was a favorite, but I ate silently, flying paper dogfights in my head. Dad wasn't home yet, and the women in my family had no interest in scientific sport. After the dishwasher was loaded, I returned to the little green table, moving it, and my fleet, into the center of the living room.

I resumed by cutting paired slits in the trailing edges of the planes' wings, adding ailerons of differing dimensions: wide, narrow, short, and long. When finished, I methodically threw each plane several times, weighing the merits of each, stashing the rejected versions under the table, at my knees. My brute-force approach yielded a plane with long narrow flaps, one marginally wider than the other. When thrown hard, the flaps bent down, allowing the plane to climb, but as speed was lost, the inherent springiness in the paper returned the flaps to a normal, high-lift orientation. Additionally, a wider flap steered the plane in a gentle spiral, keeping it from hitting a wall.

I could toss the plane toward the fireplace, only to have it bank over the couch and return to my hand, boomerang-like. On my knees, in the living room, I flew missions over the furniture, past the picture window, again and again. I had mastered aerodynamics, physical laws were my playthings, this aircraft did my bidding.

Experimentally, I gave the missile a mighty heave, banking its wings into the throw. For a moment, I feared it would clip the textured shag, cartwheeling across the green carpet. Like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, I delighted in my new-found powers, as the plane climbed, up, up, wheeling toward my head. A warm glee smoldered in my smug soul, when, confidant that the paper airplane would complete two circuits around the room, I ducked my head.

WHAM.

Reeling, my hands went to my face, which had just collided with the stout and immovable little green plastic table. The room tilted crazily, my heavy, dorky glasses knocked askew. I adjusted the lenses and my fingers came away, bloody. The vision in my left eye, my good eye, clouded, my nose was warm, wet. I tasted iron. Carefully, head tilted back, I stood up, stumbled into the kitchen.

"MOM!"

At the sink, I discarded my glasses, dousing my face with water from the tap. Every splash on the stainless steel was tinged with red. I ripped a paper towel from the dispenser under the cabinet, and plastered it against my brow. Mom swung the saloon doors open.

"What on Earth... Oh, dear." I couldn't see her expression, couldn't gauge her anger. "Jesus H. Christ... Let me get a towel."

I examined my face in the bathroom mirror. My stupid glasses had slammed into the bridge of my nose, and the gaping cut gushed when I moved the washcloth aside, to dab at the drying blood on my cheek and mouth.

"I think you need stitches."

Dad still wasn't home. Mom rounded up my sisters and we all went to the emergency room in the Dasher wagon. It bears mention that our Volkswagen was a certain shade of green: avocado. Let the record also reflect that I had never, in my short life, tasted the creamy and nutritious flesh of that exotic fruit, nor, I believe, had either of my parents, but I was intimately familiar with the decorator tint.

Sewing my flesh back together, the doctor chuckled quietly when I detailed the circumstances of my visit to the emergency room. Four neat loops of silk closed the split, but my nose was so swollen that my glasses would not fit my face. Secretly, I hoped they never would.

The next day, I stood up in writing class, and related my trip to the emergency room. I held up my paper airplane, and pointed to the tiny smudge of blood on the left wing. Mister Wayerski called me his little scientist, and joked about dangerous laboratory experiments. Afterwards, Rick showed me the scar on his knee, from a bike wreck.

"You're going to play sports, play an instrument, or get a job!" On this subject, my parents marched in rare lockstep.

I found a job.

Each day, after school, Saturday and Sunday mornings, I delivered the Bellingham Herald. Fifty customers, scattered across four miles of incline, lined my pockets with a token filthy lucre, and, more importantly, liberated me from the petty dramas of my family and adolescence. I was suddenly immune from being grounded. It was brilliant.

Now, It is a solid scientific fact that a bicycle cannot survive the rigors of newspaper delivery, and, shortly, I found myself walking the five miles each day. It was the rare occasion when my mom would drive me, allowing me to ride in the VW bus with the sliding door open. My best friend, Eric, accompanied me most days, substituting for me when I went fishing with my dad or came down with the plague. He knew the route intimately and its customer's peculiarities, and he knew I had a good thing. Eric had a pellet gun, which he'd bring along sometimes, and we'd hunt squirrels, songbirds, and Nazis in the thick second-growth woods.

My paper route was absurdly plotted upon the terrain. My papers were waiting for me each day, in a plywood box, at the precise midpoint of my customers. This meant, on one hand, that I only had to carry half my papers at a time, but also that I had to backtrack both legs of the route each day. More importantly, I got to make a strategic business decision every day. From the dropoff point, I could first go up Viewcrest Drive, delivering to the nicer homes, or down into Chuckanut Village, a funky community of hippies and hardscrabble hangers-on. Each Christmas, the view homes, overlooking the water, with their tasteful woodwork, could be counted on for a tip. But, the people who lived in the Village, in shacks with add-ons, smelling of woodsmoke and clams, were friendly all year.

The Village was platted at the head of a squarish, shallow bay, protected by a mile-long stone causeway. The Great Northern railway constructed this ballast berm in the 1920's, replacing an open timber trestle, which now formed a protective breakwater. A wide gravel beach ringed the north half of the bay, with sandstone boulders and cliffs eroded into bizarre honeycombed shapes. The south side had marshy islets, through which snaked a creek at low water, full of spawning salmon in September. Between these shores, a perilous, waist-deep, fragrant and sucking mud stretched. Every day, the promise of certain adventure pulled on me, separating from responsibility like a magnetic claw, until my wristwatch nagged me back to diligence.

In addition to delivering newspapers to the homes, I was charged with collecting the subscription payments. Shrewdly, I refused to perform this task while delivering papers, preferring instead, to make several expeditions dedicated to this chore each month. I favored weekends, and, especially, nights after dinner, for such skulking around.

On a cloudy Sunday afternoon, on the cusp of spring, a collection expedition found me walking the railroad tracks, on the causeway that hemmed in the bay. I had taken a circuitous path to arrive there, having no intention, none at all, of actually collecting subscriptions from any of my customers.

Decades before, a perfect magic was performed by the engineers and laborers that constructed the railroad. Trains demand the straightest possible path between two points, and toward that end, the berm had been constructed, boulder by boulder, spanning the mouth of this cove. The tide was left to breathe through a gap in the wall, bridged by timbers oozing creosote. The north end of the causeway butted against a ridge, the root of a peninsula, known locally as Clark's Point. And there the miracle occurs. Rather than take the serpentine path around the point, rather than going over the ridge, an army of muscle and dynamite had bored through the sandstone. The tunnel described a gentle arc inside the Earth, such that, in the middle third of the tunnel, you could see neither entrance directly, only trusting their existence by the dim reflection off the moisture that seeped from the concrete, coursed down the curved ceiling, in thin films, irrigating the mossy walls.

Blinking against the daylight, having, once again, stupidly, braved the dangerous shortcut through the train tunnel, several options confronted me. The causeway ahead offered a sterile predictability: tracks, rocks, a hundred feet of trestle, high tide. On my left, northeast, flat water filled the bay, beyond which lay the Village, paying customers, duty.

The green water on the southwest side of the railroad was deep, wide beds of kelp calmed the swell, and the point blocked any wind. A narrow gravel beach spanned the crotch formed by the railroad berm and the steep shore of Clark's Point. On this balmy, grey day, at this splendid intersection of landscape and engineering, a second miracle occurred. I looked down from the tracks and saw the boat, half-submerged, sitting on the bottom, a few feet from water's edge.

Teal above, and white below, I knew it was a Sportyak, a sort of hard-shelled polyethelene raft. I'd seen dozens of them, a cheap and ubiquitous dinghy, hanging on the transoms of small power boats in the marina and in the islands. They were supposed to be unsinkable, yet here was a Sportyak sunk. There was no registration number on the bow. No vessels bobbed at anchor or moved across the inlet. The nearest waterfront home was a mile or more away. Perhaps lost in a storm, perhaps abandoned, clearly it was salvage, and, clearly, it was all mine.

Wet sneakers were a small price to pay for such a prize, and I gleefully yarded it onto dry land after a mad scramble down the car-sized rocks. I half-expected to get, predictably, caught in the act, accused of theft. I rocked it experimentally, and gallons of brine sloshed between the hull and deck. A quick and minor surgery, effected with my Swiss Army knife, yielded a two-inch square inspection hole, as large as I dared, at the aft starboard (I was a BoatOwner!) corner of the deck.

The seawater inside was illuminated with by the warm glow of light through the plastic, a tiny speckling of sand visible in the corners. No rocks, no seaweed: a good sign. Heaving, I lifted the boat bow-up, straining against the mass of leakage, easing, relaxing finally, as the water gushed through the hole I'd carved, onto the beach. I spun the now-empty boat around, and tipped it toward me, the last few drops dripping reluctantly. I flipped it, upside-down, and inspected the bottom. Barnacles and stone had scored long scratches in the plastic, but none were deep enough to cause a leak. In the corner, directly under my inspection/drain port was a dent, caused by some great impact. I could find no breach in the hull, and convinced myself that water must have infiltrated the seam between the top and bottom.

Balancing the Sportyak over my head, it wasn't difficult to clamber up and over the railroad tracks, picking my path from boulder to boulder. I hoped to carry the boat to a safe spot in the woods, but tide had flooded the bay, and precious little beach was available. A faint rain began to fall, making perfect circles on the surface on the clear, flat water. I had my pick of driftwood paddles, and perched on my knees, I alternated strokes on each side, canoe-fashion.

As I skimmed across the glassy sea, sand dabs, tiny flounders, darted away from my shadow. A kingfisher chattered overhead, a great blue heron lifted from a floating log, flapping slowly, croaking, like a feathered pterodactyl, across the water, I was navigating Paradise. I was alone on this placid and untroubled body of water, and only the woodsmoke rising, straight up, from the chimneys of homes on the distant shore belied the truth of other people in the world.

Between strokes of my ersatz paddle, I could hear a burbling noise, like a wet flapping. At first, I assumed air bubbles were fluttering under the hull of my vessel, but at one point, I stopped to savor the delicious beauty of my situation, only to hear the burbling while motionless. I twisted around, awkward in the tiny boat, bent to the hole in the deck. A pin-sized jet of water dribbled through a crack in the dent I had found earlier. Dammit! Water, a couple of inches, had violated the division between boat and sea, so I turned for the sandy shore, a scant thirty feet away.

I tipped my vessel vertical again, easier this time, and a few gallons gushed forth. I looked at my watch and scanned the shore. Several cars were parked along the short, dead-end, dirt track that gave visitors access to the beach. No one was visible on the beach. I was hoping to stash my trophy in the marsh behind that road, but the presence of people - hostiles - ruled out any plan the might expose my treasure.

Long ago, before the railroad causeay, this bay had been exposed to fierce weather from the southwest. Wind and water had wrought the lacy erosion on the rocks, undermining tremendous blocks of stone that had tumbled onto the shore, bouncing, rolling across the beach to form small islands at high water. Directly above me, one such boulder was stacked upon two others, forming a sort of cave. I dragged my boat in between the rocks and wedged it on the crumbling hillside, well above sight from the shore. I emerged, stooping, from the cache and circled around the rock pile, confirming the security of my hiding place.

Owing to the water level, I had to walk past the parked cars. There was still nobody on the beach, but I could hear voices in the marsh beyond. Probably birdwatchers. I made a beeline for home, hastily passing obviously occupied homes, people who owed me money. When I got home, I called Eric, and filled him in on my discovery.

I could hear the excitement in his voice. "This is so neat!"

In class, the next day, all I could think about was having my own private Sportyak. The day dragged, and when the dismissal bell rang, Eric was waiting for me on the grass field. We trotted straight to my house. He had already obtained the necessary permission, the night before, to join my on my paper route. We picked up the dorky poncho-bag I carried the papers in. We were off.

Of course, we delivered to the Village first, practically running, pausing to stuff newspapers into mailboxes and the few plastic Bellingham Herald tubes (which I sold to customers concerned about something called mailbox fraud) . We took opposite sides of the street, meeting in the middle of the road to hand off papers. We arrived at the bay, panting, damp in the March air.

A Subaru was parked by the water's edge, on the short gravel lane that connected the parallel paved roads. During the highest storm tides, water covered this part of the road, functionally part of the beach, with driftwood and a line of seaweed. On top of the car was a boat - my boat! A young man, obviously a college student, was standing on the bumper, knotting a rope securing the boat - his boat? - to a roof rack. My beautiful dreams, visions, plans for that boat began to unravel in my brain. I had to act.

"Hey! Where'd you get that boat?" I could hear my anguish bending my voice.

He paused, noticing us, and gestured across the water. "It was up on the rocks. Over there."

The claim sounded thin when spoken aloud, and I suspected this guy's salvage rights were better, twenty-four hours fresher, than mine. I believe I actually swooned, as the simultaneous thoughts and ideas crashed in my head: He doesn't know I found it just yesterday. This guy might just drive off with it. Two against one: Simple playground math. We could all share it. He's bigger AND older. Where would we keep it? He's going to take it. In his dorm? Don't cry, do not cry. It's not really mine. Not yet.

It was my time-tested understanding that bigger kids picked on, and took advantage of, smaller kids. I had experienced it first-hand when I changed schools, and I exercised this principle upon my younger sisters. Adults, generally, treated kids fairly. This person, laying claim to my Sportyak, might fall on either side of the line demarking adolescence from maturity. We stood there, beside his car. I tried to appear defiant, glared accusingly, and telepathically willed Eric to do the same.

In slow motion, this interloper reached for the rope laced over the dinghy. He's going to keep it.

Slowly, he pulled the rope, and it snaked through the bars and around the boat, piling at his feet.

"I'm sorry about that." The boat (my boat?) was in his hands. "I just thought someone had lost it. I was going to put a lost and found ad in the paper." Ouch. I am a thief.

"That's OK." I mopped my brow with my sleeve. "I'm glad we caught you. I'd hate to lose it. It's a great little boat." He opened the rear hatch, tossing the tangled line in the back.

"Yes, it is," He climbed into his car, waved. "Have fun!" Like we might not.

When you entered the building, the first thing you noticed was the sharp smell of chlorine. The second thing you noticed was a fainter, slightly sweet, clean smell - fresh fish. I had experience, references, I signed the non-disclosure (Surimi was high-tech, proprietary), and so started my brief career making artificial crab.

One night, a nosebleed took me off the line. Accidental, fortunate, probably the product of the dry air, dehydration, and sleep deprivation, I was sent to the QA office to staunch the flow. Ernie, the Quality Engineer, in lab coat, safety glasses, poofy hairnet, was dissecting a package of "flake". He cut the vacuum-packed pouch open with a razor knife and methodically fingered the product until he found something.

"Look at this! What do you think that is?" I plucked it from his open palm, enjoying this demonstration of trust.

"A ball bearing?" The production equipment must have required thousands of bearings.

"No, a BB!"

"What’s the difference?" I feigned bovine ignorance.

"Oh, there’s a difference…" He snatched it back, dropping it, with a rattle, into a shallow stainless pan.

I watched him, blankly daubing at my nostril. Eventually I trudged, in my floppy rubber boots, back out to my spot on the packaging line.

Later, around three in the morning, Ernie appeared on the line. I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He repeatedly ran a pair of pouches through the metal detector, the same route that all packaged product took. Each time a gate popped out, across the conveyor belt, and directed the packages into a separate plastic tote. I knew, with certainty, those packages also contained my BB’s.

When I was kid, my mom had a kitchen stool, a handy tool for reaching things on shelves, a perch for friends to set and talk, or for kids to stir cookies and sneak bites of raw egg-laden dough. She loved that stool, and when it wore out, she replaced it with a sturdy, assemble-it-yourself, high-back version, in maple. She painted it a jaunty shade of orange, just the accent to avocado Formica and green shag rug. When the first stool came apart, literally falling to pieces under my weight, it was like stepping across a threshold when the new stool entered our house. The old stool had been my nemesis, an execution tool, like an electric chair. If I could see it out of the corner of my eye, my breath would catch, my voice would fall softer, respectful. It's not that I feared the chair, but what it represented: haircuts.

Somewhere, sometime, my dad received an illustrated How-To book on cutting hair. He already possessed a set of clippers, possibly cast-offs from a veterinary clinic, and after a little light reading decided that he could make me a presentable young man, and save some money at the same time. Cutting hair, even a simple pig shave, has a learning curve. To this day, I have a thick scar, from a gouging scissors wound, behind the top of my right ear which causes eyeglasses to cant to the left if I don't tweak the temple piece just so.

Hair is composed of lifeless keratin, a proteinaceous material also comprising finger and toe nails. Completely lacking nerves, hair is dead, a solid scientific fact that I disputed for years. The combination of dad's rusty tools and aggressive style molded me into a quaking, hand-shy dog-boy when the subject of haircuts came up. Like a setter fearful of baths, I would disappear, kicking and crying when discovered and subsequently hoisted into position on the stool. Although I never had a problem with dentists, I completely understand the aversion some people develop, even after modern painless dentistry. I'm here to tell you that cutting hair hurts.

My family had moved to Bellingham, Washington from Billings, Montana, where boys were expected to look like boys, which, in the eyes of my parents, most of the male students and professors in Bellingham failed to achieve. Long hair was a hallmark of the Hippies, and for years my Montana relatives were fascinated by stories about men that looked like women. The other crucial element of my Big Sky origin was the Scando-Teutonic genotype that I inherited. Pale skin and blond hair, shorn to quarter-inch fuzz, guaranteed certain sunburn on my scalp, and I learned to sport a ball cap on my tender head. My unprotected ears, however, fried like eggs in the northern sun, and in the summer months the burnt skin flaked off like stale potato chips.

We moved when I was in fourth grade, and I was quickly greeted by Matt, a friendly, fearless boy, a year older, his hair shaped into what he called a "mop". Like the Monkees, he was cool, and my mom must have taken pity on me when I mentioned my envy for his long hair. Dad grudgingly attempted to learn a scissor cut, which still, inexplicably, hurt like hellfire. I no longer looked like a junior Marine, and I saw my social standing improve at my new school, Happy Valley Elementary, where no one wore a crew cut.

In fifth grade I rode a train by myself, back to Montana for the summer, to "work" on my grandparents' farm, with the fantastic goal of earning money for a ten-speed bike. They belonged to a small tight-knit "church", meeting in family member's homes twice a week, and I was soon led to understand that my shaggy hair was pure homemade sin. Grandpa sat me down, opened the bible, searching until he found the justification he needed to mandate the haircut:

Does not even nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair, it is a dishonor to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is a glory to her? For her hair is given to her for acovering. 1 Corinthians 11:14-15

After reading me the verse, he paraphrased: "Boys with long hair are a disgrace."

My uncle Ervin held me down, like a bawling lamb, and duplicated my dad's ineptitude with scissors. Lacking proper clippers, I received a compromise haircut, well above my ears, but longer than a crew cut. In the mirror, through tearful eyes, I saw the boy I would recognize years later, playing banjo in Deliverance. Somewhere, I found a floppy, leather hat, a souvenir from Mexico, and wore it constantly to protect my dignity and albinism, at 3500 feet of elevation, under the blazing Big Sky.

I experimented briefly with growing my hair out in my late twenties. I was managing a Birkenstock store in Seattle, and I was tired of the bowl cut, the Caesar style, as kinder persons called it. This gave me a reason to wear a bandana, a different one each day, to restrain the bangs that would otherwise obscure my vision. Slowly, painfully so, my hair grew out to the point where I could finally tuck the strands behind my ears in imitation of my über-cool friend, Jorn. At last, I could pull it all into a stunted ponytail which looks ridiculous in the sole surviving photograph. I settled for a part down the middle, and my thick, straight hair fell like two greasy curtains on each side of my head.

There was a character on the TV series, Northern Exposure, named Ed Chigliak, played by Darren E. Burrows. He defined undefinable cool on the show, and we had the same haircut, even the same middle initials. I longed for people to compare us, but, in reality, I looked more like the villainous teacher of the Dark Arts, Severus Snape, from Harry Potter. Eventually, I succumbed to the tiny voice hissing inside my head, "You look like a complete ass." I went to Supercuts and had the whole tangled wreck shaved off my head, back to square one. When I picked up my son, Alec, at his daycare later, he burst into tears because I looked like someone else.

Ten years later, I experimented with actually shaving my head, switching to an electric shaver when I lopped off, like a carrot top, a mole behind my left ear. My head is uncommonly round, and I worried that it might be mistaken for a bowling ball, my narrow eyes imperceptible on the broad expanse of pink flesh. I grew a goatee with a thin wispy moustache drooping around the sides of my mouth. The goatee suggested where my face was located, but with the shaved head, and my bulk, I looked like a stereotypical B-grade biker movie bad-ass. I scraped off the facial hair and joined a more respectable society when I began volunteering for the local fire department.

Eventually, I grew tired of shaving my head every few days (and the frightened look in children's eyes), and went back to the original buzz cut, which morphed into the more stylized, and military, high and tight. Also known as a jarhead, a crew cut on the top, the sides and back trimmed as short as tools and talent allow. Some say the name comes from how the ears stick out like a jar, but the true origin is lost in USMC lore. I like the low maintenance of the style, and it offers a professional appearance at 0300.

My hair is the perfect shrub to the stylist's topiary. It quickly (about an inch a month) grows straight out, like the Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Barber guy, and lays down only after attaining a length of several inches. Until that time, it forms a halo around my head that looks like a bizarre dandelion gone to seed. Interestingly, the shortest hairs grow faster, and two week after a cut, it's all the same length.

The tenacity of my fuzz tends to highlight any lapse of attention by the barber, and I remained loyal to the rare but transient souls that could meet my high standards. After some time, he or she would quit or get fired, and I would renew my search for competent barber. Too many times, I examined my pelt, after a new stylist's trim, only to find a myriad of stray hairs poking up like so many snags in the carpet. Clipping these bristles myself was as frustrating an exercise as writing my name backwards in the mirror, upside-down, and invariably resulted in snipping at precisely the wrong place and copious profanity.

But no more. I have found my follicular angel, in the guise of Joie, at Rudy's Barbershop. She cut my hair flawlessly for my Chief's interview, and continues to do so three years later. She knows my preference for guards (a razor finish on the sides and back, a 3.0 on top), and has the process down to a quick and easy art form. Rather than take the cafeteria offering of the first-available barber, I'll call ahead to get my name on her list. My schedule allows me to exploit the slower times of day and I seldom wait long.

It's my one vanity, perhaps a little OCD, perhaps the result of childhood trauma, but it's all mine.

The roads are rimed with ice, thick in places, bumpy, dangerous. Cable chains, coupled with tremendous weight, give our aid car traction and mobility. It's two in the morning, and we are hurrying on the treacherous streets, closing distance with the medics. The address is at a mobile home park, "The Estates", a manicured ersatz village brimming with retirees, trailers lined up in tidy, landscaped, aluminum rows. We go there often.

At the station, Rich had stared sleepily at the map on the wall, pulling on his bunker pants. "I don't know where we're going."

"It's by the freeway." It had sounded so helpful in my head, before I said it. I try to coax my groggy mind into showing off with turn-by-turn directions. "Follow the medics. They know where they're going."

We lose sight of their flashing red and white lights. A dispatch to "chest pain" is urgent in itself, but a slow start and an icy night make me anxious. The medics have made the only possible turn, and when we come around the corner, we can see them again, two blocks ahead. I'm in the officer's seat, pulling on nitrile gloves, Rich is focused on navigating the slippery route - slow on the corners, faster on the straights. He closes the gap between the two vehicles, and I relax a little.

We arrive seconds behind Medic forty-six, parking behind them, and uphill on the glazed asphalt lane. A narrow set of stairs leads up to the door under the carport. I wait at the bottom, until the medics are inside. Last week, I was bringing a gurney into a similar mobile home, and my foot went through a rotten plywood step. I bounce experimentally on the treads, assessing their strength, should we need to carry a patient out this door - no cracking or creaking under my weight.

I enter the home, and a woman is flitting about at the front door. "I was hoping they'd send some handsome firefighters!"

"Nope," I deadpan, "They sent us, instead."

I expect her to usher us to our patient, but one of the medics, Eric, asks her to take a seat and launches into interview mode. I've got a report and clipboard in my hand, and it's my role to record patient demographics (name, age, address), medical history and chief complaint. I'm still groggy, and I strain to make sense of the conversation, recording pertinent facts. No one asks her name, so I scan the counter for medications. I pluck a bottle, empty of oxycodone, from the window sill. I squint at the label.

"Are you Peggy?"

She is and she has a host of medical issues, none of them cardiac related. But because she uttered the magic words to dispatch, the medics are chasing down the chest pain path. They hook up the cardiac monitor, sticky little blue patches connected to wires at her shoulders and hips, under her robe. Nothing remarkable.

"The pain is right here." She thumps her belly with a closed fist, below her ribcage. "It goes to my stomach, and chest. And my back."

Roger leans her forward and palpates her back in several places. She jumps a little when he presses her flank, in the middle of her back.

"Oooh, right there."

"Well, Ma'am, I don't think this has anything to do with your heart. But, these boys will be happy to take you up to the hospital... -if you want." Boys. Rich and I are both over forty. But it sounds down-homey. I let it slide.

She wants. Happily, she can walk just fine, and no one is too concerned if she does, but we would be for a patient in cardiac distress. Rich and I each take an arm, and steer her toward the door of the aid car, mincing our steps on the packed ice. She has some difficulty climbing in, due to her bum knee, but I don't want to lift her on the gurney, on this icy hill, if I don't have to. We take our time and soon she's belted into our bed in the back of the aid car. The heater barely maintains 68 degrees F, against the bitter cold outside, but I shake off the chill, and call the nurse, while Rich starts us in the general direction of the two hospitals.

I flesh out the report in the back of the rig, while we bounce along. The document constitutes a legal and medical record of the event, and different types of calls require specific information. She was never asked her to rate her pain during the interview.

"Ma'am? On a scale of one to ten, how would you rate your pain? With one being no pain, and ten being..."

"Ten."

"...being the worst possible pain imaginable?" Like losing a leg in a meat grinder, like getting impaled on a fencepost, like giving birth to quintuplets - simultaneously?

"Oh, it's a ten." She smiles at me, nodding. Her hands are folded across her generous lap.

"Okey-doke. Ten out of ten. Got it. Thanks." I bend to the paperwork, making a note of her statement, but I frame it in quotation marks, in the subjective section of the report.

I reckon I've experienced 7/10 pain, and it made me sob. But I've seen 10/10 pain. I've heard the wailing, the moaning, the pleading for it to stop. The desperate writhing. The gnashed teeth, enamel squeaking, the clenched knuckles, squeezed bloodless, white. Ten out of ten? Balderdash. Hooey. Confabulation. Steaming bullshit.

There's no traffic, and despite the ice, we arrive at the hospital shortly. After a short wait, we are sent to a room at the emergency department. Peggy wriggles from our gurney to the hospital bed, after we raise the latter to the same level. There hangs a new flat screen monitor on the wall which monitors and displays vital signs. I like technology, and I comment on the addition to the room.

"Oh. I thought that was a TV. Isn't there a TV in here? I am so thirsty." She is sitting up, gazing about the room. "I thought there'd be TV..."

The admitting nurse has followed us into the room. "Nope. Sorry." She doesn't sound very apologetic.

I give her my short report, epigastric pain, radiating to the chest, abdomen, and back. I high-light the ten out of ten rating with animated fingers.

"Right." She looks blankly at me. "Worried about TV and a drink?" She smiles sweetly, and shrugs a little. "A ten? I don't think so."

Thank you for your interest in my 3D Printed Pinhole Cameras and photography! Thank you also for trusting me with your private email address so that I may continue our wonderful conversation from last weekend. I will not be sending out any other mass emails after this one. However, PLEASE feel free to reply with questions, thoughts, or suggestions! I am delighted to share my projects, and welcome your emails. Please, also feel free to share this email with people who may be interested.

First things first: I may not have mentioned it, but everyone who gave me an email address (86!) was entered into a drawing for one of my latest cameras, the ACME. The ACME has fewer parts, NO FASTENERS, and is very easy to 3D Print. You can find more information here:

Without further ado, the ACME now belongs to: bgadekenXX@XXXXXXXXXX.XXX

(bgadekenXX, I will be emailing you separately to arrange delivery)

-------- Schlaboratory 3D Printed Pinhole Cameras

For review: I design, 3Dprint, and shoot pinhole cameras.

Before I was 3D printing pinhole cameras, I was building them out of wood and cardboard. I learned a lot about camera design and construction, but it was impossible to share my camera designs and improvements required time and carpentry. After I built my first 3D printer, I quickly tired of printing other peoples' stuff and wondered if I could 3D print a pinhole camera. The PINHE4D used 35mm film, was ghastly to look at, but made real photographs, and worked better than my wooden cameras ever did. 3D printing allowed me to quickly iterate the fit of parts and improvements to the design, and - more importantly - lets people all over the world download, print, and shoot my cameras.

They are licensedCreative Commons - Attribution - Non-Commercial. That means you can print them, modify them, share them, but you must attribute the original designer(s), and you can't sell them or use them for commercial purposes. I struggle with the non-commercial aspect, but I don't want to see poorly-made cameras on eBay with my name on them. If you have interest in using my cameras in a project, the license allows for exceptions.

Most of my camera designs have basic instructions for printing and assembly, as well as related comments and questions from users. I am always available for help and explanation.

NOTE: You must use an OPAQUE filament when 3D printing cameras!

-------- Pinhole Cameras

A pinhole camera is essentially a light-proof box with a tiny hole and a shutter. An image is projected into the box when the shutter is opened and if there is a photo-sensitive medium (film, paper, digital sensor) in the box, a photograph may be made.

A lensed camera focuses light by refracting it with a lens (or lenses). The pinhole is much smaller than the aperture of a lensed camera and the image is projected from that small aperture. The combination of aperture size and distance from the medium dictates the "speed" of a camera (how much light hits the medium) represented as an f/number. A lensed camera may have as small an f/number as f/22, but a pinhole camera may be much smaller, f/135, f/180, f/256. With less light hitting the film, the exposures are longer, possibly very much longer than with a lens.

The pinhole, itself, is actually not as critical as you might think. Good enough is definitely good enough. Because I tout my cameras as working tools, I am diligent in my process and precision. I make my own pinholes using this methodology:

Additionally, I check my pinholes for diameter and roundness with a digital microscope, but that is probably entirely unnecessary.

Attached to this email, find a mini zine titled Pinhole Photography Short & Sweet (PPS&S.PDF). You can print this out (100% size) and fold it into a tiny booklet. The zine explains the basics of exposure for pinhole photography. Making photographs with a pinhole camera is the essence of photography and will improve all of the photographs you make.

-------- 3D printing

A 3D printer can be thought of as a tiny glue gun, attached to 3-D Etch-A-Sketch, controlled by a computer, following a set of instructions like a player-piano. There are other kinds of 3D printers, but most consumer/educational machines are "Fused Deposition Modeling":

1. I first design the parts using simple Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tools

2. Save the design in a file format that numerically describes their shape and volume in space (.STL)

3. The STL file is processed with a "Slicer", a bit of software that creates layered tool-pathing for the 3D printer from the original design. The Slicer is configured specifically for the printer and the filament being used.

4. The resulting instructions (GCODE) are fed into the 3D printer in real time by a controller connected to a computer or reading the GCODE from a memory card.

5. The 3D printer "draws" the first layer with molten plastic (remember, like a tiny glue gun), first the outline, and then filling in interior spaces. The plastic is precisely fed into the "extruder" (the tiny glue gun) as a thin filament from a spool. Large volumes of plastic needn't be solid, "infill" is a variable parameter.

6. After the first layer is drawn, the extruder is lifted a tiny bit, and the next layer is drawn on top of the first. And so on. The layer height can vary - I use 0.25mm for my prints, but most printers are capable of finer resolution, at the expense of print time.

Despite the details and complexity of my cameras, I use very simple, FREE design software:

I share every photograph I make with my cameras. Pinhole photography needn't be an unpredictable process with "happy accidents". If you understand your camera, film, and exposure, you will create the photographs you imagine in the scenes you see.

My photos are grouped by camera or subject and should be in reverse chronological order:

Join me on September 17-18 for the Seattle Mini Maker Faire! This family-friendly festival of invention and creativity offers tech enthusiasts, crafters, homesteaders, scientists, and garage tinkerers of all ages and backgrounds a public platform to show off their passion projects. Come see all the awesome creations!

photo credit: Evan Van Otten

@MakerFaireSEA is setting up shop @EMPMuseum 9/17 & 9/18!

Come see hundreds of amazing creations. #MakerFaireSEA

Aug 08, 16

Here, in the Schlaboratory, our scientists are slaving over simple CAD programs, with the goal of designing the best-shootin', easiest-to-assemble 3D printed pinhole cameras possible. With that in mind, the new terraPin ACME utilizes snap-together assembly, and bolt-free loading. In early trials, the slide-lock lid is light-tight and easy to use. At this time, the camera works best with the terraPin consumer winders (in nylon or metal), and off-the-shelf instrument knobs (1/4-inch shaft). Expect a revised winder-knob design suitable for FDM 3Dprinting soon.

This last photo is a composite of two exposures, inside and outside, at the back of the moving train. The outside exposure was quick - a second or two, while the inside exposure took several minutes. I used GIMP software to stitch the two resulting photographs together. No other post-processing or exposure adjustments were made. All photos made with Fujifilm Velvia 50 slide film. The optical vignetting is prominent in some of these shots due to the limited exposure latitude of this film. Black and white or color negative films may have less of this vignetting.

In a quest for an easy-to-print and -assemble pinhole camera design, I present the terraPin Prime. There are only four parts to the body, plus the winders (many options for this), using gaffer tape for some tasks. The only fasteners are the fixing bolt for the cap and the pivot for the shutter. Easy-Squeezy! (Make sure you are using absolutely opaque filament!)

Like all my camera designs, I have posted ALL THE PHOTOS I have made with the Prime.

I haven't been posting much lately because I have been working, among other things, on my photo book! The eBook version of RECTILINEAR Turista is hammered out and available for download. There was a defect in the form of a rotated photos, but that has been resolved. I used Bookwright by Blurb to create this, and it's a solid tool for making a nicely formatted book. When I discovered the problem with the photos, I contacted customer support. I am sorry to report that I could not get any help until I used Twitter to publicly call out Blurb for ignoring my incident. Seemed to work and somebody fixed the glitch in the matrix. The tech couldn't tell me exactly what happened, but assured me that it wasn't in the printed editions I ordered for preview. You can download the eBook HERE. Watch this space for more information about print editions of RECTILINEAR Turista

When I was a kid, the time between holidays and birthdays elapsed at a glacial pace – except for summer. Summer surged and heaved, a torrent, suddenly evaporating on Labor Day, leaving me stranded in a new classroom, confused and anxious, in my newest clothes. I have a whole catalog of sensations, mostly olfactory, that will instantly conjure my back-to-school apprehensions. Souring fallen leaves, linoleum, dew-dappled spiderwebs, a cool morning and the tang of an oil furnace… These memories are hard-wired into my brain and I fully expect them to surface in my doddering years. I may some day forget my caregiver’s name, but never the smell of a new spelling book.

As I’ve grown older, and have fewer years ahead of me, I have observed an unfortunate paradox regarding the experience of passing time. Those twenty-five weeks from Christmas to the fourth of July, that seemed a full eon in my youth, are gone in a flash. Indeed, even birthdays occur so rapidly that I’ve had to pause to calculate my age. Ten years have gone by and so fast... a lifetime for a fourth grader.

I’m not alone in this observation, and many people have mused on specific whys and how-comes. I used to wonder if our expanding Universe was shrinking the fabric of time like a clothes dryer, in some cruel cosmic equilibrium. Objective measurements of space-time, by genuine and lettered scientists, do not support my wild suppositions, however. The two most compelling explanations are “time ratios” and “novelty”.

The “time ratios” explanation, first couched by French psychologist Pierre Janet, dates back to 1877. Simply put, as you get older, a year is a smaller percentage of your age. The human brain apparently marks time on a relative scale. A single year for a ten year-old is equivalent to five years when he is fifty years old. I haven’t done the math, but a logarithmic calendar seems unworkable for planning even a cocktail party, when everyone lives at a different point on their time curve.

Amazingly, novelty – specifically unique life experiences – seems to slow the objective experience of passing time. Think back to that first day of school. Remember all the new faces, the new classroom, your new shoes, and the new expectations. The next day, it was still new. By the time you were comfortable with addition, what’s this? Multiplication? And so on. In an unfamiliar environment, everything is alien, and your brain is hyper-alert, actively engaged in making sense of your new surroundings. This necessary mindfulness packs your cerebellum with useful memories and connections to weigh and analyze every waking moment. No wonder Christmas takes so long to arrive.

As an adult, your life is probably fairly stable and routine. Everything has a predictable rhythm and weeks, months can go by without any noteworthy events. The wide, calm river of time carries you without a ripple, nothing breaks the glassy surface.

People who have been in traumatic car collisions can provide vivid accounts of the sound of the impact, what they saw in the moment, the smells of anti-freeze, gasoline. They describe junk from the floor adrift in the passenger compartment. An airbag blocks their vision and suddenly everything is quiet. An event that happened in a couple of seconds is magnified, unfolded in the brain and remembered in endless fractal detail.

I don’t want to crash my car to expand time. There are innumerable ways to add novelty to one’s life. Career changes, divorce, a new home, anybody’s basic list of stressful life events will do. Novelty needn’t be harrowing nor grim, it can arise naturally and easily through travel to a new or foreign destination.

A week spent in an unknown city will seem, in hindsight, a dilated temporal extravaganza. The food, language, public transit, are all nuts to be cracked, with wit, will, and wisdom. Waking hours packed with adventure and exploration harken back to kindergarten, when the world was bigger and brighter. It can be exhausting, but I promise your memories will be rich and plentiful. A week spent elsewhere will overshadow your routine daily existence, and for many years to come.

And this can be done at home, too. Seek out the new, the unknown. See your city, your hometown, like a tourist. Find the things that make visitors gasp. Take your normal weekly routine and pull it tight across a new landscape. It will stretch and the months of your year with it.

The river of time will ebb in its progress, not as a languid delta of featureless mud, but like a playful mountain stream. Your hours will tumble across the slope, bubbling and dancing over boulders, under and through log jams, eddying in tranquil leafy pools. No two rapids will be the same, there may be a waterfall occasionally, but you will catch your breath in the bracing spume for a moment before riding a rocky chute to another crystalline pool. And you will never forget.

A long time ago, when I was a kid, I remember being forced to sit through my aunt Sally’s vacation slides. We’d be at her house for a holiday of some sort, having stuffed ourselves on roasted turkey or pot roast, with side dishes like gratin potatoes and green beans. I might be poking at the remnants of my third helping of yams. My sister and my cousin would be huddled in a corner, animating their dolls. The adults, stuporous, languished at the table, sipping canned coffee and painting their plates with the palette of desserts from the kitchen counter.

My aunt would slap her thighs and spring up. The table would suddenly be cleared, the dishes hastily stacked by the sink, and we’d all be ushered through the sliding door, into the paneled den. A folding screen would come out of a closet, the slide projector produced, like a magician’s rabbit, from a suitcase-sized box. A carousel of slides would be plucked from a stack of identical boxes.

I sat on the floor, in the dark, soaking in gorgeous Kodachrome, as my aunt extolled the pleasures of their latest (seventh?) visit to Disneyland. As an eleven year-old who had never been to Disneyland, I was carried aloft in a swirling hormonal storm of envy, longing, anger, curiosity, and awe. I wanted to get up and leave, but I didn’t want to might miss anything.

More than fifteen years elapsed before I was able to find my own way to Disneyland. Of course many things had changed, but much was the same. I vividly remembered my aunt’s photos of Main Street USA, and Small World, and Frontierland. I strolled around the park, waited in lines, rode the rides, and marveled at the animatronics. Everything was exactly what I expected but so much better. I was a pilgrim finally visiting holy ground.

I was riding the small gauge steam train that circles the park, reveling in the intoxicating incense of bunker oil and creosote, the rhythm of steel wheels on rails, when I understood why my aunt implored us to sit in her darkened family room and submit to her photography. I had always suspected that the trays of slides were a boastful artifice, collected and curated to elicit precisely the jealousy and humility I had felt. As that powerless eleven year-old, I had never expected that I might travel the 1200 miles to Disneyland. Yet, there I was.

I ached to freeze that perfect blissful instant, aboard that clacking little steam train, that I might later relive, savor, and share it. Kodachrome might have come close. All I have from that day are memories. They are excellent memories, but I wonder if a thousand words can match the pictures in my head.

I have said this since I was a kid. I believe that adventure can be found anywhere! Adventure is something you can cultivate during a visit to a neighborhood park or travelling to a distant, exotic destination. Adventure often finds you when you dare to break out and try something new and unknown.

Beehive and I were in Barcelona for Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day last April, meeting up with more than 30 (pinhole) photographers from around the world. Having never been to Barcelona, we took every opportunity to strike out and explore new corners of the city. We typically took the subway to an distant destination, and then made the long walk back to our flat. On this particular day, we had taken the train to the Montserrat Monastery and on our return trip decided we were not quite ready to call it a day. We got off the train at Espanya Station and rather than catch a subway connection, we climbed from the depths of the city to find ourselves in a new landscape, Plaça d'Espanya.

Like spokes in a wheel, surface avenues and boulevards intersect at this point, while underground, subways and distant-service train lines converge. Arranged around the monuments and fountains in the center of the roundabout are all manner of interesting architecture. A former bullring loomed to the north, now a shopping mall. Beyond that, Miró's Dona i Ocell (Woman and bird) rose like a technicolor giantess from a park bearing the artist's name. Behind a chain link fence, we wished we could get closer.We walked a little further, and found a modern fire station at the edge of the park. It was late in the afternoon and no activity was to be seen Probably still siesta time. I really wanted a Barcelona fire department t-shirt, but I didn't want to disturb anybody.

Bombers de Barcelona (Barcelona Firefighters)

At this point, I am tired, hungry, and my feet ache. Beehive, inspired by Miró's Dona i Ocell and the relative proximity of the Miró museum, makes a case for walking up and through the Montjuïc to the museum. The Montjuïc, a low hill rising over the south end of Barcelona, has played a role in defining Barcelona culture for centuries. Several venues were built here for the 1992 Olympic games. Castles, fortifications, arenas, and museums are clustered on this mound.It's not a high hill, but the steps seem endless (there are actually escalators, but they weren't working) as you climb from the plain of Barcelona's streets and avenues. We paused to catch our breath and look out over the glorious city, and I shot this urn in the clouds.

An Urn With A View

My comfort and mood were both eroding as we continued to climb the hill, navigating toward the Miró museum using Google maps on my phone. By the time we arrived, I was sweaty, crabby, hungry, and tired. Of course, the museum closed in forty five minutes and I would have to check my camera bag. At least no one insisted on x-raying my film again. I kept one of my pinhole cameras in my hand, fully intending to exact a pinhole photographic revenge on the museum. Miró had an agenda of turning art on its ear and achieving an "assassination of painting", in the interest of promoting contemporaneous socio-political issues. In the context of his world, Miró was punk. He challenged accepted norms concerning art, design, and composition. He painted huge canvases with extremely subtle and fine linework in the interest of communicating his distress over Spanish politics. I sat for eight minutes, mulling his commitment, while my shutter was open.

Miró Tryptich: ""Painting on white background for the cell of a recluse"lines on essentially blank canvases.

Miró was connected to his contemporary surrealist/abstract artist friends and Alexander Calder has a couple of sculptures represented at the museum. The Mercury Fountain is an amazing monument to the mines at Almadén, Spain, which produced some 250,000 metric tons of mercury over nearly two millennia of operation.

The Mercury Fountain, Calder

As I wandered the halls of the museum, basking in the genius of Miró, I felt my hostility and agitation melt away. As often happens, closing time loomed and we began to hurry from one exhibit to another. An outside terrace beckoned, primary colors screaming for attention in the fading light. We stepped outside.

"Girl Escaping", Miró 1967

"The Carress of a Bird" Miró 1967 (handheld)

I balanced my pinhole camera on a handy surface to capture one sculpture, while choosing to hand-hold my camera for a different sculptural work. I worried that I might incur the wrath of the surly staff for using a camera in the museum. We tried to visit the gift shop, but were told that it was closed because the museum was closing in 15 minutes. I am positively certain that I could find whatever I wanted to purchase in 15 minutes, but it seemed to be a consistent theme for our visit to the Fundacio Joan Miró. I felt my mellowing mood skewing toward agitation again.Outside the museum, a characteristically red sculpture by Calder beckoned and I opened my shutter once again, this time on a proper tripod, seeking the contours and rivets that are common in his work. My mood eased and I felt at peace again.

I have my friend Hank to thank for the Body Snatcher idea of Zines, innocently planted in my brain during a recent breakfast. I've since been thinking a lot about a small run of a photo zine, featuring themed pinhole photos. This little pamphlet is the first of such things to be spawned by Hank's inspiration. I plan to include it with pinhole cameras that I send to people. It assumes some ignorance, and isn't really meant for experienced pinhole photographers. I like the idea of some small color photos printed on the reverse side. Stay tuned!

Two short years ago, I convinced my wife, Beehive, to join me in a grand social media experiment. The plan was to travel to Amsterdam, meet up with other pinhole photographers, and watch the awesome happen. On Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day (WPPD).This amazing convergence was concocted largely by Alex, a self-deprecating git from Norfolk, with help from Inge, a charming photographer from Rotterdam. The idea began as an off-handed suggestion on Twitter, growing like a baby as people signed up on the Eventbrite page. This was happening before my eyes, unfolding in tweets, with perfect timing for my attendance.

I work in civil service and I pick my vacation for the coming year every December. As luck would have it, everything - the grand scheme, the wife's support, the necessary days off - aligned like celestial orbs, portending a good trip and new friends. It felt like unstoppable destiny.We met in Amsterdam, and, well, we had a blast. Everything was amazing - the city, the weather, the people, the food, the drink, everything! I remember it vividly, and I'd love to write more about it, but this is a love story that takes place elsewhere.

Amsterdamp, my official entry WPPD14, P6*6, f/167, Ilford FP4, 02:00

After our adventures in the Netherlands, we took the train under the channel and had some days in London, and then off to Reykjavik, Iceland. Beehive had been to London many times, but I had only been through the airport once. So, we stayed in the Portobello Road area, and hoofed it all over town, visiting museums, the Tower, and taking in an amazing performance of Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare's Globe, on the bank of the River Thames. I had brought some film with me to Europe that I had never shot as pinhole before: Ilford black and white, and some Fuji Velvia 50 slide film. The reciprocity failure corrections for different film stocks vary widely, and I rely on the collective intelligence of the Internet for that data, in lieu of testing myself. So, shooting a new film on Pinhole Day was a bit of a gamble. In England I leaned on my old friends Acros and Ektar. In Iceland, we rented a "three-door Jeep", a tiny Suzuki hardtop SUV, and drove a route called the "Golden Circle". We drove through the Þingvellir national park, the geothermally active valley of Haukadalur, which contains the geysers Geysir and Strokkur, and to the Gullfoss waterfall (meaning "golden falls"). I decided to try the Velvia 50.

Gullfoss, P6*6, f/167, Velvia 50 (RVP50), 00:03

I almost didn't make this photograph of the falls. We had hiked down to the falls in the bright May sun and gotten a bit damp from the spray. Back up in the parking lot, surrounded by the tour buses and milling Germans, the wind was chilling. The sun was bright, much brighter than I like for pinhole, meaning very fast exposures and potential for camera movement and unwanted blur. I loaded my pinhole camera with the RVP50, and screwed an ND filter onto the front. I was cold, the conditions were too bright, but I thought about how I very probably would never be here, in this amazing place, ever again. I left my wife in the Suzuki to warm up, and trudged up the path to an overlook. I set up my Gorillapod and metered the scene. Even with the exposure stopped down by the filter, the shutter would only be open for a few seconds. Putting a filter in front of your pinhole requires absolute cleanliness unless you want dust to be visible in your infinite depth of field. It also prevented me from using the finger-in-front-of-the-pinhole trick to avoid disturbing the camera during shutter movement. When I got back to the Suzuki, I had no idea if my exposure had worked. We drove off through a landscape that looked like Hawaii, eastern Washington state, and Alaska, sometimes all at once.

Back in Reykjavik, I continued to shoot the Velvia50, liking the slightly longer exposures in bright light.

We walked to the highest point in town, upon which stands the Hallgrímskirkja. A towering concrete church, it took 41 years to build and is designed to look like columnar basalt formations. An elevator takes you to the top of the church, for sweeping views of Reykjavik and the mountains beyond.

Across the street from the immense church, we enjoyed coffee and the open-face sandwiches that are ubiquitous in Skandinavia.Later, that evening, I hopped in the "three-door jeep" and drove frantically around town making pinhole photos in the hours-long Icelandic twilight. We were to fly out the next day and our time in Reykjavik was far too brief.

I visited the Sun Voyager, a harbor-side sculpture evoking a Viking longboat bent on explorations and discovery.

Reykjavik is home to a world-famous hot dog stand. Dating back to 1937, Bæjarins Beztu Pylsur has repeatedly been ranked the best place to get a hot dog in Europe and the world. The customers queuing for a wiener eyed me suspiciously as I twined my Gorillapod through a chain link fence and aimed my camera. In the fading light, I "acted natural" and pretended to talk on my phone during the lengthening exposure.

HARPA is a multi-purpose concert and cultural hall on the Reykjavik waterfront. A glowing glass and steel structure, it houses both the symphony and the opera.

Reflecting pools in front of the hall were mirror calm as the evening enfolded me.

I raced back to the top of the town, to make a photograph of the Hallgrímskirkja. I perched my pinhole camera on the base of Calder's statue of Leif Erickson, and opened the shutter for twenty-four minutes. The light was evaporating and I decided to double the original metered exposure as the sky darkened.

I returned to the apartment, disoriented and excited. I couldn't believe that it was almost midnight and I had been making pinhole photographs so late.

The next morning, on our way to the airport, we scheduled a detour to the Blue Lagoon, a hydrothermal spa, conveniently situated to extract one last payment from tourists who would sip ten-dollar beers in the silica-rich water. The landscape is otherworldly, and the pool is ringed by volcanic rock that would cut your feet to ribbons if you chose to escape overland. Those same rocks hide the geothermal plant that supplies the hot water to the spa, but beneath the low clouds it was truly surreal. Again, I reminded myself that this might be a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I set up my camera before catching the bus to the airport.

Everybody has one. My first blog was about my experiences in the Fire Service, which morphed into an autobiographical writing project. Later, I started another blog to share my tech projects, but lost interest in both. I am currently involved in the 52rolls photography project, which is a photo blog. I'm a little bit behind in my posts, but I have ample fodder in the thirty rolls of film I shot in Spain recently.Since my first blog, I have expanded my social media use, particularly Twitter, but recently also Instagram, sharing photography and science/tech projects and interests. There is a lot of cross-pollination in the Internets of schlem, with various and duplicated content, but this blog is about my photography, especially pinhole film photography. Despite a lifetime of photography and other artistic creativity, only recently have I really begun to self-identify as an "artist".So I humbly offer this, my latest bloggy project, with best intentions and a realistic understanding of my abilities, goals, and commitment. What are my goals for this blog? Glad you asked - My pinhole camera designs have been widely featured and discussed in various media, always with my photos supporting the capabilities of my cameras. I'm at a point where I want to discuss my photography as much, if not more, than the cameras I make. I also want to promote film photography, and provide technical data on exposure where possible. If I use a photo created with a digital camera, I will label it as such. Otherwise, expect the specific film used, at a minimum. Additionally, film photos will be uncropped and as scanned, unless otherwise noted.I have committed to the Flickr platform, and there I upload all my pinhole and other film. I don't, however, use Flickr to share much context or narrative on my photos. One thing I really appreciate about making pinhole photographs is the intimate engagement with the subject matter during the deliberate processes of composing and exposing. This forum can provide for some detailed story-telling in ways that Flickr, Instagram, and Twitter cannot.I plan to work on some print-related projects, including a photo zine. I print stickers and postcards, and this can serve as a portal to my other graphic design, as well as information on the terraPin pinhole cameras I make. Pinhole cameras, of course, can be expected, and I have an idea for an inexpensive light digital meter for pinhole or manual exposure use. I may even try a crowd-funding campaign after I get a working prototype. Stay tuned.I said this would be a photo blog, and here, for your perusal, are a couple of photos:

Velvia50, 2HT 3Dprinted stereo pinhole camera, f/167, 00:02

This is a pinhole stereo pair that I shot last November in New Orleans at the Saint Louis No. 1 Cemetery, the tomb of Voodoo Priestess, Marie Laveau. This is a "crossed" stereo pair, and you can best view the stereo effect by hacking your vision. Crossed stereo is easy to "free-view" in larger sizes, too. You can view this full-size HERE.These simultaneous exposures were made through two pinholes, 61mm apart. I made the 0.30mm pinholes by hand, and checked their shape and diameter with a digital microscope before mounting them in the "terraPin 2-Headed Turtle". I used Fujifilm Velvia 50 slide film and exposed it for 2 seconds in the bright (EV15) Louisiana sunlight. The shutters in the camera move in opposite directions to balance any induced movement when making an exposure. I am very satisfied with how evenly matched these two frames came out. Even the flaring from the sun on the edges of the pinholes is very similar in size and effect! In fact, I find all the stereo pairs I have made with this camera have come out well. I have several rolls of stereo pinhole from my trip to Spain that I plan to share soon.I will post updates to twitter, or you can subscribe to my blog. Thanks for your interest, and remember to always move to the right for lights and sirens!